Today is the 12th day of Israel's murderous attacks on Gaza.
The Palestinian body count is 336, 70 of whom are kids. This has become a murderous spree of killing for the zionist terrorist army, supported by government of this racist colonial entity and by their people , many of whom have been turning increasingly into blood thirsty mobs urging the murder of Palestinian
On the eve of Abu Khudair’s lynching, Member of Knesset (Israel’s parliament) and government faction whip Ayelet Shaked issued a call over Facebook to ethnically cleanse the land, declaring “the entire Palestinian people is the enemy.” She advocated their complete destruction, “including its elderly and its women,” adding that these must be slaughtered, otherwise they might give birth to more “little snakes.”
... Since the beginning of July, raging crowds of Jewish Israelis just like these have marched through Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Nazareth and Beer Sheva, chanting “Death to Arabs” and “Death to Leftists,” swarming and attacking vulnerable victims. While a tiny contingent of radical Israelis have formed a loose “anti-fascist” network that tries to patrol city streets and prevent additional lynchings, they are extremely few in numbers and cannot be everywhere at all times.
While Israeli leaders unleash conscripted soldiers to bombard Gaza, they dispatch ultra-nationalist vigilantes to conquer cities inside Israel. With the incitement to murder Palestinians (and the few Israeli allies they have) continue unabated, it seems to be only a matter of time before the bubbling bloodlust boils overs into a bloodbath.
I am sure that you, the people behind Archinect, are well aware of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, this racist colonial entity that has been described by Moshé Machover as being far worse than the south african apartheid system: "talk of Israeli ‘apartheid’ serves to divert attention from much greater dangers. For, as far as most Palestinians are concerned, the Zionist policy is far worse than apartheid. Apartheid can be reversed. Ethnic cleansing is immeasurably harder to reverse; at least not in the short or medium term."
The global BDS movement is a peaceful movement that has been, in the face of Israeli racist, oppressive and genocidal policies against the Palestinians, garnering great traction around the world as people everywhere are increasingly grasping the nature of the Zionist establishment that is called Israel. Through a deliberate, effective boycotting Israeli products, academics, businesses, items of interest, the movement contributes to the economic and moral isolation of Israel.
“In light of Israel’s persistent violations of international law, and Given that, since 1948, hundreds of UN resolutions have condemned Israel’s colonial and discriminatory policies as illegal and called for immediate, adequate and effective remedies, and Given that all forms of international intervention and peace-making have until now failed to convince or force Israel to comply with humanitarian law, to respect fundamental human rights and to end its occupation and oppression of the people of Palestine, and In view of the fact that people of conscience in the international community have historically shouldered the moral responsibility to fight injustice, as exemplified in the struggle to abolish apartheid in South Africa through diverse forms of boycott, divestment and sanctions..."
I notice that there are Israeli businesses being hosted within Archinect's firm listings (for example). As are listings of Israeli universities within the academic section. I highly urge Archinect, the people behind it, Paul, the editors, the writers....to desist from ignoring your responsibilities apropos taking a stand against this racist entity and to remove all Israeli related material from Archinect. You, like everyone else has that responsibility, because you have the knowledge and you have the right of choice. To ignore this is to be complacent and to be regressive.
As a virtual space that spans the social, the professional and the academic, as a gathering of professionals including architects, designers, artists, engineers and others, as a gathering of minds that by implication suggests a progressive humanist endeavor, please instate an anti-zionist, anti-israeli policy (that covers israeli academics, businesses, media, etc) in the spirit of the BDS movement.
Alternative
Oct 3, 14 1:26 pm
That's because you're hateful.
Alternative
Oct 3, 14 1:28 pm
What is "false debate"?
Alternative
Oct 3, 14 1:30 pm
Does "false debate" mean that one must engage with views that might conflict with one's own worldview?
Orhan Ayyüce
Oct 3, 14 1:30 pm
look in the mirror and the answer will appear to you. you should teach it.
Alternative
Oct 3, 14 1:33 pm
Am I "false debate"?
Alternative
Oct 3, 14 1:34 pm
Your rejoinder amounts to: "I know you are but what am I?"
Alternative
Oct 3, 14 1:49 pm
"Let's give Israeli authorities architecture and planning awards for building significant settlements on rather difficult hillsides and and lands gifted by God to immigrant Jews from Russia and Brooklyn."
Actually, many Jews in Israel are Mizrahi Jews expelled from Arab countries in 1948.
Not to mention Holocaust survivors whose home states wouldn't take them back after they were released from death camps. But whatever, details!
Orhan Ayyüce
Oct 3, 14 2:02 pm
You are posting pages of information but not addressing any of the atrocities inflicted on civilian population of Gaza that took a place last summer. You are not offering any debate on that but arguing on how it is everybody else's fault. That is a false debate in the face of documented facts and barbaric bombing that took a place just recently.
And here is a response to your silly and personal attack on my teaching.. Btw, I teach architecture not debate.
'Justice for Jewish refugees from Arab countries', new propaganda initiative from Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon.
The expulsion of Palestinians and destruction of hundreds of villages in 1948 was a catastrophe (Nakba) for an entire society, while in the case of Jews from the Middle East, their arrival in Israel was in line with the state’s Zionist raison d’être.
In the words of Israeli professor Yehouda Shenhav, "any reasonable person" must acknowledge the analogy to be "unfounded" :
Palestinian refugees did not want to leave Palestine...Those who left did not do so of their own volition. In contrast, Jews from Arab lands came to this country under the initiative of the State of Israel and Jewish organizations. Some came of their own free will; others arrived against their will. Some lived comfortably and securely in Arab lands; others suffered from fear and oppression.
There are other problems. Australian professor (and supporter of Israel) Dr Philip Mendes has written how "the Jewish exodus from Iraq and other Arab countries took place over many decades, before and after the Palestinian exodus" and "there is no evidence that the Israeli leadership anticipated a so-called population exchange when they made their arguably harsh decision to prevent the return of Palestinian refugees". In other words: "the two exoduses…should be considered separately".
Furthermore, one person’s rights are not ‘cancelled out’ by another’s: the rights of Jews to recognition of and compensation for lost properties across the Arab world are legitimate, and entirely separate from the Palestinian refugees’ rights. Yet revealingly, ask Danny Ayalon and Israel advocacy groups if they support full rights for all refugees, Jewish and Palestinian, and you will get prevarication or silence.
In the hands of Israel’s Foreign Ministry, this is yet another cynical propaganda ploy that seeks to counter growing awareness of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine with rhetoric of "the other Nakba". As the co-founder of Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa (JIMENA) put it in 2007:
Most of the people advocating campus hasbara
chatter of clouds
Oct 3, 14 2:19 pm
Also...not forgetting the involvement of Zionist agents targeting Jewish communities around the Middle East in order to scare them into aliyahs:
Two confirmed activists in the Zionist underground were found guilty by an Iraqi court for the bombing, and were sentenced to death. Another was sentenced to life imprisonment and seventeen more were given long prison sentences.[1]
However, the question of who was to blame for the attacks has drawn considerable disagreement. Whilst the allegations against Israeli agents had "wide consensus" amongst Iraqi Jews,[2][3][4][5][6] there was a tendency to blame their ills and misfortunes on the Zionist emissaries.[citation needed] However, the allegations against the Zionist agents were viewed as "more plausible than most" by the British Foreign Office.[7][8][9][6][3][4]
Such involvement has been consistently denied by the Israeli government, including by a Mossad-led internal inquiry,[10] even following the 2005 admission of the Lavon affair.[11][12][13][14][15]
In mid last October, the Israeli main paper Yedioth Ahranoth (Ynetnews) published a historical study by Yigal Bin-Nun; an Israeli historian and professor in Bar Ilan University, confirming and documenting Zionists crimes against Moroccan Jews in North Africa in order to convince them to immigrate to Israel. In his study Bin-Nun has confirmed what I wrote back in 2007 (The Myth of Jewish Refugees from Arab Land).
Bin-Nun is originally a Moroccan Jew, who immigrated with his family to Israel. In his historical research he states that the Mossad; the Israeli secret service, had sent to Morocco in early 1960s a group of its agents, whose primary mission was to carry out terrorist attacks against the well-settled Jews, to convince them that they were the victims of persecution by the kingdom, and to encourage them to immigrate to, and to settle in Israel promising them all expenses paid throughout the whole process.
For many centuries Morocco (Al-Maghrib) had large prosperous Jewish communities, known as Mizrahi Jews, who lived peacefully with their Moslem Arab neighbors. This peaceful coexistence encouraged Spanish Jews (Sephardim) to escape to Morocco during the Spanish Reconquista period when Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand recaptured Spain in the 13th century, and ordered the Jews to either convert to Christianity or leave the country. After 781 years of flourishing existence under the Islamic Caliphate rule, many Spanish Jews escaped Christian persecution to the more welcoming Islamic Morocco.
The Jewish virtual library confesses that Mizrahi and Sephardim Jews of Morocco enjoyed greater equality with Muslims. Many of them gained important positions in the government administration as officials and in courts of law as judges. The Jews had their own quarters in the main cities, where they had their own schools, their own synagogues, and even their own courts and judges. They comprised a large section of the middle class, who played large roles in the economy, trade, industry and educational system of the kingdom.
All this was changed with the invention of the Israeli state, especially after Zionist leaders had sent their agents to encourage and to bribe Moroccan Jews, among many other Arab Jews, to immigrate to occupied Palestine. Considering themselves Moroccan citizens of the Jewish faith, the Jews initially rejected Zionism. Yet some young Jews were seduced into enlisting into the Mossad. They were smuggled into Israel to receive military and terrorist training. They were sent back to Morocco to perpetrate terrorist attacks against both Jews and Arabs and to distribute hate inciting leaflets in order to incite conflict between the two groups. Three agents were arrested and allegedly died under torture.
curtkram
Oct 3, 14 2:33 pm
when you say:
Let's give israeli army nobel peace price for everything they did for Gazan women, children and civilians.
was that genuine? are you actually advocating giving a nobel prize to the israeli army? or is this an example of 'false debate,' where you use sarcasm to hide the unfortunate fact that it's difficult for you or tammuz to discuss the actions that caused the israeli military to think it has to respond with such violence, or the actions that caused israeli legislatures to propose discriminatory referendums? i don't know whether you teach 'false debate,' but it seems you practice it.
if you want peace, why not post about how peace can be achieved, rather than just why we should all hate israel? otherwise, you just think israel doesn't have a right to exist - but it does exist. so this is your attempt to change the real situation into your ideal where you can negate the existence of the people and the nation of israel? if that's the case, it sounds a lot like you want to commit the sort of genocide you're accusing israel of committing.
the barbaric acts you're referring to did occur. nobody is disputing that. those acts have been addressed; we all agree israel committed violent acts. i think what others have tried to point out is that there were also violent acts carried out by palestinians and that played a role in causing israel to lash out the way they did. you and tammuz will only accept part of what happened as real. why not try to address the events that influenced the current course of action? because it's just easier to pretend israel is a monster? is it part of your academic background to disregard evidence if it doesn't support the propaganda you're currently trying to sell and call for the censorship of israeli universities since they might disagree with you?
The role of Israel and Zionist undercover agents in helping precipitate the departure of Jews from Iraq has long been suspected.
Naiem Giladi, an Iraqi Jew who joined the Zionist underground as a young man in Iraq and later came to regret his role in fostering the departure of some 125,000 Jews from Iraq, wrote that, “Zionist propagandists still maintain that the bombs in Iraq were set off by anti-Jewish Iraqis who wanted Jews out of their country.” But “the terrible truth,” Giladi said, “is that the grenades that killed and maimed Iraqi Jews and damaged their property were thrown by Zionist Jews.”
After being sentenced to death in Iraq for his Zionist activities, Giladi fled to Israel. Because his native language was Arabic, Giladi was assigned to assist the Israeli military occupation authorities expel Palestinians from their homes in al-Majdal (“Ashkelon”) by pressuring them to sign documents stating they were leaving to Gaza willingly:
I was there and heard their grief. “Our hearts are in pain when we look at the orange trees that we planted with our own hands. Please let us go, let us give water to those trees. God will not be pleased with us if we leave His trees untended.” I asked the Military Governor to give them relief, but he said, “No, we want them to leave.”
I could no longer be part of this oppression and I left. Those Palestinians who didn’t sign up for transfers were taken by force—just put in trucks and dumped in Gaza.
Orhan Ayyüce
Oct 3, 14 3:06 pm
the barbaric acts you're referring to did occur. nobody is disputing that. those acts have been addressed; we all agree israel committed violent acts.
So I am boycotting Israel and advocating it publicly. What part of that you don't understand Curt?
why not try to address the events that influenced the current course of action?
Again, here is your address.
When are you hasbara not attack my personal professional life and practice? Are you all non-entity cowards? I tried everything to be forgiving for you all and even complimented some of you when you had a whiff of humanity in you. So far my job, my mother (by you curtcrumb?), my relatives, my writing and other personal things attacked by you. This is racist trash disguising as reasonable ghosts. Creatures to be more precise. My words really threatening your being that much to bring this personality attacks each time you are proven to be useless?
Alternative
Oct 3, 14 3:30 pm
To be clear: Tammuz is now arguing that the mid-century expulsion of Arabian Jews was a Zionist conspiracy.
Orhan: no one is attacking your family, just your refusal to engage in heated debate with even a shred of civility.
Orhan Ayyüce
Oct 3, 14 3:30 pm
and some fart called me vulgar the other day. what about the gang bang "real" and "cheap" vulgarities and lies directed towards me and to (you know who)..?
Alternative
Oct 3, 14 3:36 pm
What vulgarity has been hurled against you?
Orhan Ayyüce
Oct 3, 14 3:51 pm
Oh I forgot. . Somebody even called me Orphan and thought it was a fun project!
curtkram
Oct 3, 14 4:19 pm
what does your mother have to do with this orhan? honestly, i would rather keep the conversation out of the gutter and be able to talk about the events that led to the current problem the palestinians are facing in a way that could help educate other readers and possibly help build a solution. i haven't been calling you names. i've been doing my best to act like you have the sort of professional demeanor your position would imply.
it wasn't just the people of israel being monsters. in order to move forward in a way that encourages peace, i think people have to understand what happened that caused the current situation to get as far out of hand as it's gotten.
you will not be able to understand what both the palestinians and israelis are currently facing if you refuse to accept half the of the atrocities that have happened. it's those things that have happened that caused the conflict to escalate to where it is now.
i understand you're boycotting israel. you absolutely have every right to do that, as does tammuz, and i'm not saying you should stop your personal boycott. i would rather archinect not get involved, but then i'm not on their staff so i don't think i get a say anyway.
i understand israel took land from the palestinians. i understand the israeli military mowed over arafat's compound. i understand hamas refuses to discuss disarming. i understand there is a lot of warranted resentment and hatred on both sides. you don't seem to understand why that happened. you seem to only understand israel hurt the palestinians, and you can't figure out why.
so why boycott instead of learning about what actually happened, talking about it, and trying to teach people what really happened instead of a skewed perspective designed to make people hate israel? why not try to find actual solutions instead of just faketivist boycotts and complaining?
curtkram
Oct 3, 14 4:20 pm
Oh I forgot. . Somebody even called me Orphan and thought it was a fun project!
you should just pretend it was everyone who disagreed with you. maybe that would give you sound justification for your own immaturity?
Alternative
Oct 3, 14 4:20 pm
Sorry an anonymous internet poster called you Orphan.
subgenius
Oct 3, 14 4:54 pm
The myth of Palestinian land loss is laughable.
The 1946 map does not show sovereignty or land ownership of Palestinian Arabs. It just shows settlements of Jewish Palestinians in the British Palestine Mandate.
Just another example of how Hamas and Palestine consider any measure appropriate to deliver the nefarious and unjust message. Confusion, deceit, terror, and violence is within every message they bring forth. Their intolerance and brutal methods of society are in their last grasps...but they will be relinquished.
Orhan Ayyüce
Oct 3, 14 7:33 pm
baby killers' supporters are now talking about civility...
all the evidence is documented in this thread. you can change your tune, anonymous names, you can do whatever you want but you can't hide from the fact that you supported murderous acts.
all we support here is a non violent boycott to bring world's attention to these crimes. we are winning and you are not.
say whatever you want. go ahead you have no shame anyway...
Orhan Ayyüce
Oct 3, 14 9:16 pm
it is perhaps just a photo up but message is clear, even the good cop is getting tired of bad cop.
Alternative
Oct 3, 14 9:30 pm
I wish you peace this weekend, orhan and Tammuz.
Orhan Ayyüce
Oct 3, 14 10:07 pm
if you really mean it, thank you.
my days are quite peaceful and busy. i wish you the same.
drums please, Fab?
Oct 3, 14 10:38 pm
OH SO INSPIRATIONAL!!!1!
Orhan Ayyüce
Oct 3, 14 10:48 pm
here we go... that is what i mean. it never fails i guess. pretty soon somebody is going to say i am a hater. fucking cockroach FRaC. you are so full of shit that is why you sank that low...
awaiting_deletion
Oct 3, 14 11:57 pm
and the whole time I thought it was FARC....oh its FRaC, my bad...
Activists stage a sit-in protest at the headquarters of the French Football Federation to protest plans to allow Israel to host UEFA 2020 games
The Union of European Football Associations has rejected an Israeli bid to host games during the 2020 European Championships. The decision follows a campaign by Palestinian sports teams and campaign groups and activists across Europe.
The Israeli Football Association bid to host games in Jerusalem as part of the UEFA 2020 tournament that will take place across 13 cities, but UEFA announced on Friday that Jerusalem was not one of the successful bidders. Israel was one of just 6 countries that failed in its bid to host games.
(...)
In a public letter protesting against UEFA’s decision to allow Israel to host the Under 21 tournament in 2013, more than 50 footballers including Didier Drogba and Frederik Kanoute called the Israeli-hosted tournament “a reward for actions that are contrary to sporting values”. In 2010, UEFA president Michel Platini said: “Israel must choose between allowing Palestinian sport to continue and prosper or be forced to face the consequences for their behavior”. Campaigners are now planning to intensify the pressure on Platini to live up to his promises and suspend the Israeli Football Association.
[The following press release and statement announcing the endorsement by over 250 anthropoligists of the movement to boycott Israeli academic institutions were issued on 1 October 2014 by the below-identifed group of anthropologists.]
For Immediate Release October 1, 2014
Over 250 Anthropologists Join the Call for a Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions
More than 250 anthropologists have signed a statement endorsing the burgeoning movement to boycott Israeli academic institutions in protest of Israel’s systematic human rights violations against the Palestinian people. These violations, in which many Israeli educational institutions are complicit, include denying Palestinians their right to education and academic freedom.
As scholars who specialize in how power, oppression, and structural violence affect social life, and as witnesses to the State of Israel’s multiple and egregious violations of international law that constitute an assault on Palestinian culture and society, they pledge to abide by their discipline’s stated commitment to “the promotion and protection of the right of people and people’s everywhere to the full realization of their humanity.”
These anthropologists have determined that the policies, actions, and programs of Israeli academic institutions are complicit in the occupation and oppression of Palestinians in Israel and in the Occupied Territories in multiple ways. In calling for this institutional boycott, they pledge not to collaborate on projects and events hosted or funded by Israeli academic institutions, not to teach at or attend conferences or other events at such institutions, and not to publish in academic journals based in Israel. They remain open to collaboration with individual scholars based in the Israeli academy.
The signatories of the statement call on their anthropologist colleagues to join them, along with thousands of members of a growing number of US academic associations (including the American Studies Association, the Association for Asian American Studies, and the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association), in answering the call from Palestinian civil society as well as from a number of Israeli anthropologists, to cease legitimizing Israeli academic institutions and thereby condoning their role in the continued suppression of the basic rights of the Palestinian people.
Esteemed journalist Max Blumenthal was given unfettered access to the worst hit areas of Gaza during the summer’s onslaught by Israel. He provided this testimony to the Russell Tribunal on Palestine in Brussels last week, as the world’s leading jurists and civil society members assessed Israel’s culpability for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The executions seemed to fall into two categories: humiliation, and functional.
Here is one example of the jocular nature with which Israeli soldiers murdered some Palestinians in Gaza:
Dan Cohen and I conducted an interview with two ICRC volunteers from Gaza, 25-year-old Ahmed Awad, and 24-year-old Ala’a Alkusofi, who worked with ambulance crews throughout the war, the video of which will be released in the near future. They recalled entering Khuza’a during the siege of the town to collect the body of Mohamed Abadla, a local man who had been tied to a tree by both arms and riddled with bullets. When they arrived at the execution site, a group of Israeli soldiers ordered one of the volunteers’ colleagues to exit the ambulance, walk five meters forward, then light a cigarette lighter. When he did so, they shot him in the heart and leg, killing him in front of his colleagues.
On the functional side, evidence gathered by Blumenthal points to “a clear pattern” of executions of Palestinians able to speak or understand Hebrew.
“Hesham Naser Shamaly, 25, described to me what happened when five members of his family decided to stay in their home to guard the thousands of dollars of clothing stocks they planned to sell through their family business. When soldiers approached the home with weapons drawn, Shamaly said his father emerged from the home with his hands up and attempted to address them in Hebrew. “He couldn’t even finish the sentence before they shot him,” Shamaly told me. (His father survived.)
In Khuza’a just east of Khan Younis, multiple witnesses described soldiers gathering locals in the center of town as they occupied the area on July 23, then asking if anyone spoke Hebrew. When a 54-year-old man stepped forward to answer in the affirmative, they shot him in the heart.
When I interviewed the Abu Said family in the southern city of Rafah, I found more evidence of the wanton targeting of Palestinian civilians who spoke Hebrew. Nineteen-year-old Mahmoud Abu Said told me when Israeli soldiers arrived at his family’s home on the city’s eastern outskirts, they immediately inquired if anyone spoke Hebrew. When his father, Abdul Hadi Abu Said, answered in the affirmative, they shot him in the chest (he miraculously survived).”
Beyond these deaths aimed to humiliate Gaza civilians, or eradicate Hebrew speakers, there were other clear war crimes — including the murder of a mentally disabled man.
At the eastern edge of the central area marked in orange Hebrew letters as “Soccer Field,” I met Mohammed Fathi Al Areer. His home was a virtual cave furnished with a single sofa. In Al Areer’s backyard, four of his brothers were executed. One of them, Hassan Al Areer, was mentally disabled and had little idea he was about to be killed. Mohammed Al Areer said he found bullet casings next to the heads of his family members when he discovered their decomposing bodies.
A further worrying aspect of Operation Edge was the wiping out of entire families in targeted attacks. During the Summer, 89 Palestinian families in Gaza were wiped out entirely, with not a single family member left. As of 24th August, the cessation of formal hostilities, at least 142 families had lost more than three family members in a single incident.
According to Blumenthal’s evidence, one such family was found in the rubble of Khuza’a:
The ICRC volunteers told us they later found a man in Khuza’a with rigor mortis, holding both hands over his head in surrender, his body filled with bullets. They then discovered a family — men, women and children — so badly decomposed they had to bury them with a bulldozer in a mass grave. The vast majority of bullet wounds they found were to the head and chest.
Images of the of bodies of civilians of en ethnic group murdered in cold blood being poured into mass graves evokes the very worst memories of 20th century genocide. As such, 327 survivors of the Nazi holocaust (and their descendents) recently wrote an open letter, published in the New York Times and Israel’s Haaretz newspaper, condemning the ‘massacre’ in Gaza. They wrote:
By As'ad AbuKhalil - Mon, 2014-09-29 15:42- Angry Corner
It is the season of the revival of the “Arab Mind”: propagandists for Saudi princes around the world are peddling the same message contained in the racist book, The Arab Mind. Propagandists of Saudi princes who write in English have another task: they are competing to inherit the role of Fouad Ajami in Zionist US media. They know how much American mainstream media and Israel appreciate the schtick that Arabs are responsible for their misery, or that, as Ajami put it over and over again in his cliché, Arab wounds are self-inflicted. Saudi Arabia decided on orders of the US to take on ISIS and the Saudi regime may also have its own fears from ISIS. But the propaganda outlets of Saudi regime act and sound in unison, claiming that the Saudi regime is blameless, and that the US and Israel are humanitarian warriors in the Arab world, and that Arabs are backward by their very nature. To blame the US or Israel for Arab wars and divisions is tantamount to blasphemy in the Wahhabi doctrine.
Nevertheless, it is not an arduous task to enumerate the various ways in which the US and Israel are directly or indirectly responsible for Arab misery and the state of wars. Let me count the ways:
1.) Civil wars: there has not been one Arab civil war since the WWII which was not instigated or at least prolonged by the US and or Israel, from Lebanon, to Sudan, to Iraq, to Syria, to Somalia, to Jordan, and Algeria.
2.) Divisions, partitions, and secessions: the US and Israel have supported or armed every single Arab secessionist movement from the split of the United Arab Republic (UAR), to the Kurdish revolt in Iraq, to the partitionists in Lebanon, to the Southern Sudanese rebels, to the attempt to tear apart the Iraqi state after 2003.
3.) The US has prevented heavy, and even light, industrialization of the region. In all cases where the US sponsored the imposition of market economy, the markets were flooded with imported products, and the US – through the World Bank and the IMF – insisted on the dismantling of the public sector. Compare the state of military and civilian industrialization of Egypt under Nasser with its current affairs since the formation of the Camp David regime. Egypt was on par with the South Korean economy and, without the Camp David regime, Egypt would have surpassed India in economic development.
4.) The US (acting often on behalf of Israel but also on its own volition) worked to undermine the military power of all Arab states. The US clearly destroyed the Iraqi army, and it has been working hard to destroy the Syrian army, and it turned the Lebanese, Jordanian, and Egyptian armies into police forces capable only of internal repression. It also forced the Libyan regime of Qadhdhafi to surrender his most advanced WMD potential. To be sure, Gulf regimes were allowed to import advanced but restricted weapons whose main purpose is cash transfers from the Gulf to the West, and for possible future use by the US to protect these regimes and Israel.
5.) US and Israel have sponsored the overwhelming majority of Arab repressive regimes. The repressive regimes of Morocco, Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria (after Houari Boumediene), Sudan (under Gaafar Numayri), Somalia (under Siad Barre who drove the country to ruin), Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Jordan, Iraq (under Saddam Hussein in the 1980s), UAE, Oman, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Lebanon in its most repressive eras. The people of the region suffered a great deal in their attempts to overthrow their regimes but the US insisted on the preservation of those regimes.
6.) The US and Israel helped train and equip the torture and repression apparatuses in Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, UAE, Oman, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Jordan, Lebanon (under certain regimes of Sham`un, and Gemayyel), Iraq (in the 1980s), Kuwait, and Somali (under Siad Barre).
7.) The US sponsored and supported the most conservative and most reactionary brands of Islam during the Cold War and worked with the Saudi, UAE and Jordanian regimes to unleash a militant internationalist Jihadi Islam to pit against Nasser and against world communism.
8.) The US has always been on the side of the regimes against the side of those who champion feminism, enlightenment, progress, and secularism.
9.) The US and Israel fought all attempts of Arab unity and integration, and during the Cold War conflated Arab nationalism with communism, by the admission of Archie Roosevelt in his “For Lust of Knowing.”
10.) The US funded and/or armed the worst militias and reactionary political parties in the region.
11.) The US funded and sponsored the worst samples of the Arab press: the most sectarian and the most sleazy all in return for parroting American propaganda.
12.) The US deliberately prevented the Arabs from liberating Palestine and thus allowed Israel to remain a major factor in the destabilization and fragmentation of the region. The US violently prevented peace (real peace with the restoration of Palestinian rights over all of historic Palestine) from prevailing in the region.
13.) The US, while preventing the Arabs from obtaining the arms that are necessary to defend lands and people from Israeli aggression, flooded the region with arms that are only used for sedition, civil wars, and chaos.
14.) Through the peace process and through other means, the US sponsored the Israeli occupation and aggression which resulted in so much deaths and destruction since 1948.
15.) The US has pushed Arab regimes to enact more restrictions on the press in order to ban voices critical of the US and Israel.
16.) In the name of “the war on terrorism,” the US has in fact pushed Arab regimes toward more repression.
This is only a partial list and leaves one with no doubt that Arab problems are largely inflicted by the US and Israel (and the chorus in the EU).
Dr. As’ad AbuKhalil is a Professor of Political Science at the University of California, a lecturer and the author of The Angry Arab News Service. He tweets @asadabukhalil.
drums please, Fab?
Oct 4, 14 1:26 pm
here we go... that is what i mean. it never fails i guess. pretty soon somebody is going to say i am a hater. fucking cockroach FRaC. you are so full of shit that is why you sank that low...
you, a hater?
baby killers' supporters are now talking about civility...
and
... even the good cop is getting tired of bad cop (Benjamin Netanyahu).
no, no, definitely not a h8ter!
chatter of clouds
Oct 4, 14 4:16 pm
An interesting and brief read from Max Blumenthal, concerning time and the 2 state solution (for those still holding on to that "solution", seriously or not so seriously):
I must govern the clock, not be governed by it.” –Golda Meir
Since the dawn of the peace process, serious men and women have warned that time was running out on a two state solution. If dramatic, urgent measures were not taken and painful compromises not made, the apocalypse would soon be upon us all. Though the peace processors rarely stated what the End of Days would look like, its form was always implied: The failure to establish a Palestinian state somewhere in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip would bring Israeli apartheid into the open, plunging the Jewish state into a crisis of legitimacy that would result in its rapid unraveling.
The transformation of an ethnically exclusivist Jewish state into a multi-ethnic confederation or democratic bi-national state is absolutely unacceptable to all parties involved in the peace process. That includes the Palestinian Authority, whose legitimacy rests on the notion that it will eventually become the steward of an autocratic Arab state with the consent of Israel and support from the US and EU. So as the facts on the ground render Palestinian statehood a fantasy, the peace processors must continually wind back the alarm clock on apartheid, indefinitely postponing the date with destiny to preserve the status quo and secure their paychecks.
Below, I have compiled news clippings dating back to 1981 that demonstrate the unusually fluid conception of time in the minds of the peace processors. Time may have run out long ago, but for them, it is never too late to negotiate. [continue to souce]
A Palestinian family sits in their destroyed home in the al-Tuffah neighborhood of Gaza City on 21 September.
(Anne Paq / ActiveStills)
Families in the occupied Gaza Strip suffered further tragedy during the month of September after two migrant boats smuggling hundreds of passengers, the majority of them Palestinians from Gaza, were deliberately sunk off the coast of Malta. Only about a dozen survived.
“Reports indicate that most of those who drowned, or [are] still missing were young people, but there were also whole families,” the United Nations Office of the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) states.
The ongoing economic siege and repeated military assaults have compelled hundreds of young Palestinians in Gaza to pursue a better future by paying thousands of dollars to human traffickers to escape to Egypt via tunnels and then to Europe by sea, says OCHA.
The Gaza ceasefire reached on 26 August after 51 days of catastrophic violence was maintained during September despite Israel’s failure to lift the siege. Israeli naval forces fired on Palestinian fishing boats and farmers. Two mortars were fired from Gaza towards Israel, causing no casualties or damage, and Hamas forces reportedly arrested those responsible, according to OCHA.
Three Palestinians in Gaza were killed and two injured after unexploded ordnance (UXO) from the summer war detonated after the victims had loaded it into their vehicle and were driving in the area of Shujaiya east of Gaza City on 19 September, OCHA reports.
“As of late August, around 7,000 UXOs were estimated to be present in areas affected by the conflict, threatening the lives of both civilians and humanitarian workers,” OCHA adds. “Operations to clear UXOs however, have been affected as a result of limited capacity and restrictions on the entry of equipment to the Gaza Strip.”
Tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza remain displaced from the summer assault. As of 29 September, according to OCHA, there were more than 57,000 displaced persons sheltering in 18 schools administered by UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestine refugees. A further 40,000 to 50,000 Palestinians remain with host families.
The Rafah crossing with Egypt — the sole exit and entry point for the vast majority of the 1.8 million Palestinians in Gaza — remained partly open to a limited number of travelers, says OCHA.
Only two truckloads of exports exited Gaza through the Kerem Shalom commercial crossing as of 29 September, reports OCHA, the first trucks of exports since June.
West Bank
Meanwhile, in the occupied West Bank, Israeli forces killed two Palestinian men suspected of carrying out the abduction and slaying of three Israeli youths near Bethlehem in June. More than forty Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces in the West Bank so far this year; fourteen were killed in the equivalent period in 2013, according to OCHA.
Israeli forces shot 22-year-old Issa al-Qatari in the chest in al-Amari refugee camp near Ramallah on 9 September, killing him. Earlier in the month sixteen-year-old Muhammad Sinokrot died of injuries after he was shot in the head by Israeli border police in the Wadi al-Joz neighborhood of East Jerusalem.
Several incidents of violence were reported within or next to schools in the West Bank at the onset of the new academic year.
Three children were injured when Israeli forces fired rubber-coated steel bullets toward the Dar al-Aytam school in the Old City of Jerusalem on 24 September and on multiple occasions Israeli forces fired tear gas canisters at students as they left the al-Khadr secondary school in Bethlehem, OCHA reports.
A Tulkarem secondary school evacuated 350 students on 24 September after Israeli forces fired tear gas canisters nearby; several such incidents were reported at the Zeita boys school during September.
Settlers attack children
In the northern West Bank city of Nablus on 3 September, an armed Israeli settler chased Palestinian children and subsequently entered a high school where the youths had sought refuge, OCHA states.
“According to the school headmaster, the settler identified himself as a security guard of the settlement Eli and claimed that he was verbally insulted by one of the students. Shortly after, Israeli forces raided the school and evacuated around 450 teachers and students. This and another two schools in the area have been repeatedly raided by Israeli forces following various allegations by settlers,” according to OCHA.
Israeli settlers attempted to kidnap an eleven-year-old Palestinian child in East Jerusalem last month in the fifth such incident in the city since June, excluding the kidnapping and murder of sixteen-year-old Muhammad Abu Khudair on 2 July.
Israeli settlers sprayed chemicals into the faces of two children, aged ten and twelve, near the Ibrahimi mosque in Hebron on 13 September, OCHA reports. A seven-year-old boy was hospitalized after being run over by a settler in the same area the following day; five similar incidents were reported in Hebron addition to eleven throughout the West Bank since the beginning of the year, according to OCHA.
On 2 October, Israeli forces completely destroyed a dairy and farm in Hebron for lack of Israeli-issued building permits, OCHA states. The factory was raided earlier this summer and nearly $1 million worth of equipment was confiscated.
Owned by the Islamic Charitable Society, the dairy generates the majority of funds supporting several orphanages and schools; approximately 3,500 orphans are expected to be affected by the demolition, in addition to the factory’s twenty employees, according to OCHA.
The high school certificate of seventeen-year-old Adeel Balata sits in the ruins of her Jabaliya refugee camp home on 14 September. The house was destroyed in an Israeli strike which killed eleven members of the Gaza family. Adeel, a successful student who aspired to become a doctor, was among those killed during the attack. Only one member of the family survived.
Palestinians in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza Strip, hold pictures of their relatives who were killed during the Israeli offensive during the 10 September visit of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh.
A Palestinian woman inspects her house which was destroyed in an Israeli airstrike during this summer’s seven-week offensive in the east of Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip on 13 September.
Palestinians in Gaza City hold pictures of their relatives who went missing after two migrant boats carrying five hundred smuggled passengers, many of them from Gaza, were deliberately sunk in the Mediterranean, 21 September.
Palestinian migrants sit in a police building in Rafah after their arrival to the Palestinian side in the southern Gaza Strip on 23 September. Egyptian naval forces arrested Palestinian migrants and sent them back to Gaza, witnesses said.
Freed Palestinian prisoner Salim al-Hashash sits on the shoulders of a relative during the celebration of his release from Israeli prison in Rafah, southern Gaza Strip, 24 September. Al-Hashash served ten years after he was convicted of being a member of Hamas’ armed wing and for taking part in resistance against the Israeli army, according to his family.
Palestinians take part in a protest in front of the Red Cross’ office in Gaza City demanding the release of their relatives held in Israeli jails, 22 September.
Palestinians carry the body of sixteen-year-old Muhammad Sinokrot during his funeral in the Wadi al-Joz neighborhood of East Jerusalem on 8 September. The boy was wounded by police fire on 31 August and died from his injuries on 7 September.
Palestinians throw stones at Israeli police during a protest following the death of a Palestinian teenager in the Wadi al-Joz neighborhood of East Jerusalem on 7 September. Sixteen-year-old Muhammad Sinokrot was wounded by police fire in the neighborhood on 31 August and died from his injuries on 7 September.
Palestinian women mourn as men carry the body of Issa al-Qatari during his funeral in the al-Amari refugee camp near the West Bank city of Ramallah, 10 September. Al-Qatari was killed by Israeli forces earlier in the day after camp residents confronted raiding soldiers.
Palestinian security forces carry the body of Raed al-Jabari, 35, during his funeral in the West Bank city of Hebron on 12 September. Al-Jabari died in Israel’s Soroka Medical Center after he was tortured by Israeli prison guards while being transferred between jails, Palestinian officials say.
Osama Bseiso, 41, lies on the ground after he was injured during clashes with Israeli forces at a protest against the Jewish settlement of Ofra in the West Bank village of Silwad, near Ramallah, on 12 September.
The Israeli settlement of Beitar Illit, built on land expropriated from the Palestinian village of Wadi Fukin, continues to encroach on even more land taken from the surrounding Bethlehem area, 26 September.
Palestinian activists protest in front of the Ramallah offices of the architect firm Assia on 21 September. Activists state that Assia is collaborating with Israel’s plans to forcibly transfer 12,500 Palestinians from East Jerusalem to a town in the Jordan Valley by agreeing to build the new town project.
Palestinian students protest the US State Department’s development agency during the visit of the American consul to an-Najah National University in the West Bank city of Nablus on 29 September.
Residents of the unrecognized village of Dahamash and supporters protest against the plan to demolish sixteen houses in their village in the Ramle-Lod area of present-day Israel, 13 September. Residents have long struggled to get the state to recognize the village and provide it with basic services.
Palestinian children walk on the rubble of their home which was demolished by Israeli forces in the Beit Hanina neighborhood of East Jerusalem, 3 September.
Palestinian students arrive to Arab al-Kaabneh school near the West Bank city of Jericho on 8 September. Israeli authorities have threatened to demolish the school’s structures because they were built without an Israeli permit.
Boys line up in the morning for daily exercises in a United Nations-run school in the Shujaiya neighborhood east of Gaza City on 15 September. The school year in Gaza was been delayed because of Israel’s offensive, during which UN schools became shelters for many of the tens of thousands displaced.
Palestinian children who medics said were wounded during the Israeli offensive on Gaza this summer wait to be given permission to cross into Egypt at the Rafah crossing for treatment on 8 September.
A Palestinian father receives a diploma for his son who was killed in the Israeli war on Gaza during a commencement ceremony at the University College of Applied Sciences in Gaza City on 8 September.
A Palestinian stands next to a map spray-painted by Israeli soldiers earlier this summer in a home in the Shujaiya neighborhood east of Gaza City on 4 September.
Mortars and spent ammunition from Israel’s summer war on Gaza are collected in the home of Suleiman Abu Jamaa in the southern Gaza Strip town of Khan Younis on 11 September.
Employees of the dismissed government in the Gaza Strip wait to receive their salaries at a Gaza City bank on 11 September. The failure of the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority to pay the salaries of 40,000 public servants in Gaza posed an obstacle for the fragile national unity government.
Palestinians inspect their farmland east of Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, near the boundary with Israel, on 2 September. The land was damaged during Israel’s massive summer assault on Gaza.
Affirming Israel’s right to exist has almost become the diplomatic standard in the Middle East. Why, anyone who would dare challenge this notion is obviously not rational, to say the least.
Yet the fact is, Israel does not have a right to exist. That is, Israel does not have a moral right to exist.
Israel was declared a country in Palestine when that declaration was against the will of the majority of the people living in Palestine at the time. Thus, the right of the people of Palestine to self-determination was denied. It was morally wrong. It is that simple.
Of course, the government of Israel does exist for many reasons. The two most prominent are that many feel sympathy for Jews because of the history of persecution, and therefore support the Jew’s desire for a “homeland” where they would be immune from persecution.
However, the fact that the Jews were persecuted in various times and places in history doesn’t give them the right to persecute someone else. It doesn’t give Jews the right to deny the right to self-determination to the Palestinians. Two moral wrongs don’t make a moral right.
It is also interesting that the claim for a Jewish homeland would presumably mean that Jews would want land that would not be taken away from them by someone else claiming a divine right to their homeland. That is very interesting indeed.
Another reason why Israel exists is the result of support from America, and much of that support is from Christians who believe the Bible affirms the Jew’s claim of “divine right” to the land of Palestine. Of course, there are many Christians who disagree with that conclusion, and believe it is a severe misunderstanding of the Bible.
However, what is interesting is that the Christian debate is irrelevant--Jews believe that they have a divine right to the land. And this claim is the legitimate prerogative of the Jewish faith. In fact, this is a popular claim by many faiths. Many groups of people around the world believe that they have a divine right to various lands. In fact, many in the Arab world believe that Palestine is “Arab Land”.
This raises questions of what is morally right when there is a divine right claim to the land. Is a claim of divine right a legitimate or moral reason to settle competing land claims? And, is it morally right to force one claim of divine right on someone who doesn’t recognize that claim?
The obvious answer is no, it is not morally right to force a claim of divine right on someone that doesn’t recognize that claim. It is not morally right because no one wants to be deprived of their land or property because someone else makes a divine right to their land or property that they don’t recognize. Christians would recognize this principle as the Golden Rule.
Thus, the larger issue in Palestine is not who has a divine right to the land. The issue that should be discussed is who has the moral right, and that issue has been largely absent in the debate over Israel.
Jews and supporters of Israel have been successful in framing the debate in terms of denying the Jews their divine right. But the real issue is morality. Who has the legitimate moral right to the land? And how should that moral right be determined?
And most important, what if the Palestinians don’t recognize the Jew’s claim of divine right? Should the Palestinians be murdered and their property taken anyway? Is this the proper moral position of Christians, that if the Palestinians don’t recognize a divine right, they should be murdered?
Most Christians would find that murdering Palestinians in order to impose a divine right is abhorrent to Christianity. It would be morally wrong, and thus Israel does not have a moral right to exist.
If murder or war is not morally correct in arbitrating land disputes, what is the correct moral path? The popular moral tenet in America is that the will of the people should be recognized in settling political disputes. The preamble to the Constitution begins with “We the people, …” Land claims in Palestine should have been settled by the will of all the people of Palestine.
And how should the will of the people be determined? In America, the will of the people is morally determined by voting. Americans viscerally understand that determining the will of the people through majority vote is a legitimate and moral method of settling virtually any dispute.
When the Jews declared Israel a state in 1948, Jews were approximately one-third of the population. Had there been a vote in all of Palestine in 1948 to ascertain if the will of the Palestinian people agreed that Israel had a right to be a state, that right would have been denied. The majority of the people of Palestine did not grant the Jews a right to declare Israel a sovereign state.
Of course, no vote was ever taken. Thus, for the Jews to ignore the will of the Palestinian people and declare Israel a state was morally wrong. The moral right to allow the will of Palestinian people to prevail was denied.
I only disagree with the above article on the generalization of the Jewish stance. Of course, there are many Jews -from, both, a religious and a moral standpoint- who don't and did not believe in Israel's right to exist. Zionism was initiated by largely european non-religious Jews with socialist-nationalist ideals of building a nation state (on others` land and property, of course, in vein with european colonisation - ironically, as atheists, basing their right to land on biblical interperations ) and by ultra-religious Christians who wanted to send God's chosen people to Jerusalem.
Burgeoning Christian Zionist organizations such as the International Christian Embassy (ICEJ), Christian Friends of Israel (CFI) and Christians United for Israel (CUFI) wield considerable influence on Capitol Hill, claiming a support base in excess of 50 million true believers. This means there are now at least ten times as many Christian Zionists as Jewish Zionists. And their European cousins are no less active in the Zionist Hasbarafia, lobbying for Israel, attacking its critics and thwarting the peace process. The United States and Israel are often portrayed as Siamese twins, joined at the heart, sharing common historic, religious and political values.
(...)
Christian Zionists have shown varying degrees of enthusiasm for implementing six basic political convictions that arise from their ultra-literal and fundamentalist theology:
The belief that the Jews remain God's chosen people leads Christian Zionists to seek to bless Israel in material ways. However, this also invariably results in the uncritical endorsement of and justification for Israel's racist and apartheid policies, in the media, among politicians and through solidarity tours to Israel.
As God's chosen people, the final restoration of the Jews to Israel is therefore actively encouraged, funded and facilitated through partnerships with the Jewish Agency.
Eretz Israel, as delineated in scripture, from the Nile to the Euphrates, belongs exclusively to the Jewish people, therefore the land must be annexed, Palestinians driven from their homes and the illegal Jewish settlements expanded and consolidated.
Jerusalem is regarded as the eternal and exclusive capital of the Jews, and cannot be shared with the Palestinians. Therefore, strategically, Christian Zionists have lobbied the US Administration to relocate its embassy to Jerusalem and thereby ensure that Jerusalem is recognised as the capital of Israel.
Christian Zionists offer varying degrees of support for organisations such as the Jewish Temple Mount Faithful who are committed to destroying the Dome of the Rock and rebuilding the Jewish Temple on the Haram Al-Sharif (Noble sanctuary of Al-Aqsa).
Christian Zionists invariably have a pessimistic view of the future, convinced that there will be an apocalyptic war of Armageddon in the imminent future. They are deeply sceptical of the possibility of a lasting peace between Jews and Arabs and therefore oppose the peace process. Indeed, to advocate an Israeli compromise of "land for peace" with the Palestinians is seen as a rejection of God's promises to Israel and therefore to support her enemies.
(...)
It is my contention after more than 10 years of postgraduate research that Christian Zionism is the largest, most controversial and most destructive lobby within Christianity. It bears primary responsibility for perpetuating tensions in the Middle East, justifying Israel's apartheid colonialist agenda and for undermining the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians.
The closing chapter of the New Testament takes us back to the imagery of the Garden of Eden and the removal of the curse arising from the Fall: "Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb… On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations." (Revelation 22:1-2) Surely this is what Jesus had in mind when he instructed his followers to act as Ambassadors of peace and reconciliation, to work and pray that God's kingdom would come on earth as it is in heaven.
Hamas Killed 160 Palestinian Children to Build Tunnels
Militant group used child labor to construct underground network in Gaza
An Israeli soldier is seen at the entrance of a tunnel dug by Palestinians beneath the border between the Gaza Strip and Israel on October 13, 2013. ( DAVID BUIMOVITCH/AFP/Getty Images)
As the death toll of Operation Protective Edge rises, the deaths of children are firmly in the spotlight—and rightly so. It pains all reasonable people to hear of children dying as the consequence of war. Hamas and its supporters display gruesome pictures of dead and wounded children in order to gain sympathy for their portrait of Israel as the villain intent on killing Palestinians. In response, Israel cites the need to stop Hamas from firing thousands of rockets at its own children, who are being forced to live in bomb shelters, as well as the need to eliminate the tunnels that Hamas dug into Israel in order to carry out terror attacks against Israelis. One tunnel opening was found underneath an Israeli kindergarten.
But who built those tunnels? The answer is Hamas, of course—using some of the same children who are now trapped under fire in Gaza.
The Institute for Palestine Studies published a detailed report on Gaza’s Tunnel Phenomenon in the summer of 2012. It reported that tunnel construction in Gaza has resulted in a large number of child deaths.
“At least 160 children have been killed in the tunnels, according to Hamas officials”
The author, Nicolas Pelham, explains that Hamas uses child laborers to build their terror tunnels because, “much as in Victorian coal mines, they are prized for their nimble bodies”.
Human rights groups operating in Gaza raised concerns about child labor in the tunnels as far back as 2008. Hamas responded by saying it was “considering curbs.” Following Operation Cast Lead in 2009 Hamas softened its position and the Interior Ministry established the Tunnel Affairs Commission (TAC) which, “In response to public concern at a rising toll of tunnel casualties, particularly of child workers…issued guidelines intended to ensure safe working conditions.” No mention is made in the report of the conditions that would result for both Palestinian and Israeli children from building tunnels that would be used to launch terror attacks.
Nor does it seem that Hamas paid much subsequent attention to ensuring the safety of the child workers that it used to build the tunnels that would wind up endangering the lives of many in Gaza. On a tour of the tunnels in 2011, Pelham noted that, “nothing was done to impede the use of children in the tunnels.”
Not only are Hamas misappropriating much of the humanitarian aid supplied to Gaza—800,000 tons of cement were used to construct the terror tunnels into Israel—they are also directly exploiting and endangering Gaza’s youth in their construction and operation.
chatter of clouds
Oct 7, 14 12:41 am
Not forgetting that Israel just killed 495 to 578 Palestinian children in its latest spree and thousands of others before. Not forgetting that it oppresses and denies the rights of millions of Palestinians and that it stole their lands and properties.
And if these tunnels were built, its also precisely because of Israel and the throttling choke they have over Gaza. People are being driven to use everything they have in order to resist their mass oppression and ethnic cleansing. In a state of desperation, when one is in a virtual open air prison, near starved, subject to random killings and assassinations, can one apply the rules governing a state under easy normal conditions?
Furthermore, why the obsession these Zionist bots have in bringing up Hamas? In actual fact, Zionists have demonized each and every organization, Palestinian, Lebanese or other, that stands up to it, be it Arab leftists in their 60s and 70s heydays, PLO, now Hamas and Hezbollah. Whether religious or secular, whether comprising Muslims or Christians.
And furthermore, the mass persecution and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians cannot be explained in terms of response to Hamas. In fact, it is Hamas and its like that are a form of response to Israel's genocidal hold over the Palestinians and its desire to rid the land of Palestinians.
Each and every attempt to bring up Hamas here is a calculated Hasbara move in the hope to obfuscate and to render this a fight between two equal entities and two morally equivalent ones at that. This is, of course, a lie. There is absolutely, absolutely, no way one can justify Israel's calculated agenda of ethnically cleansing Palestine -by bullying out or murdering Palestinians, en masse- as a response to the resistance factions.
Orhan Ayyüce
Oct 7, 14 1:23 am
If you stand up for Palestine in America, ‘you’re the devil,’ Junot Diaz says
In September 30, novelist Junot Diaz gave a Presidential lecture at Clark University in Worcester, MA, and late in the appearance, a woman asked Diaz about his having signed a letter protesting Israeli funding for the Brooklyn Book Festival last month. Diaz said that scholars who speak out for Palestine can be driven out of MIT and have their tenure revoked — “that’s literally the reality.” Note that he is the Rudge and Nancy Allen Professor of Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
"I mean I can’t even turn on the news for five seconds without hearing the most fucked-up racist shit about Arabs or Muslims that would never pass muster if we were talking about any other group. And so in that kind of atmosphere it’s just a shouting match. You know if you’re like, I think the occupation of fucking Palestine is fucked up on 40 different levels, people are like, you’re the devil, we’re going to fucking drive you out of MIT, we’re going to get your tenure taken away, we’re going to destroy you. I mean that’s like literally the reality. Where you can say almost anything else. You could be like, ‘I hate humans.’ … Bien. Bien. [unintelligble/Spanish/laughter] I mean, I’m sorry guys, just forget it, I mean just as a basic human being, on the basic, basic level: If you are occupying other people’s shit, guess what, you are fucked up. [Wild applause] That’s that. I mean, that’s that. and that’s a tough thing for people to stomach, man. Because we live in a country that’s currently occupying people’s fucking land. [Applause] Like, god forbid, Americans are so deranged about Palestine because Americans are thinking, like yo, if we give up here, these fucking Indians are going to want their shit back. Well maybe they should get their shit back. Since 90 percent of us don’t own anything, I dont’ know how much it would hurt us. But whatever." - Junot Diaz
Alternative
Oct 7, 14 7:39 am
It's weird how you're able to rationalize every single wrong that Hamas commits. Not to mention that the Institute for Palestine Studies wrote the report on the tunnels, and suddenly it's "hasbara." I smell intellectual dishonesty!
chatter of clouds
Oct 7, 14 7:56 am
Zionist bots smelling themselves. It is their intellectual dishonesty in focusing and framing the aftereffect of their ideology of racism, colonizaion and hatred as if the backdrop of their racist occupation was not the very raison d'être. Their warped logic calculated to turn the victim into the perpetrator and thus to smuggle away, in the eyes of the weak of mind and sight, the singular responsibility that Zionism has in stealing away a whole country and the attempt at disappearing a whole people, the Palestinians.
they will keep on saying "what about Hamas, what about Hamas..." like catatonic programmed post lobotomy zombies and feed others prepackaged arguments based neither on concern for the suffering of people and children or sound logic but on throwing up fust in the face of criticism against Israel.
Alternative
Oct 7, 14 8:55 am
Your points (or non-points) so far in this thread:
1 - Hamas is justified killing Palestinians whom it suspects to have spied on Israel because WAR!
2 - Hamas would NEVER put Palestinians in harm's way. (Zero response when confronted with footage showing Hamas placing rockets in residential areas).
3 - Hamas is justified in sending child workers to dig tunnels into Israel and misappropriating 800,000 tons of cement provided through foreign aid, because RACISM and COLONIALISM!
Listen dude, I've repeatedly stated that Israel isn't faultless. But it's astonishing that Hamas can do no wrong in your eyes.
Non Sequitur
Oct 7, 14 8:59 am
Yawn, what a waste of pixels TAM's posts are.
Alternative
Oct 7, 14 9:04 am
It also makes sense that I'd be trying to address the problem of Hamas because they're the ones launching rockets at Israel.
Non Sequitur
Oct 7, 14 9:15 am
We, minus Orhan and TAM, are all aware of this Alternative. They just picked the wrong horse to bet all their money on and cannot accept their mistakes.
curtkram
Oct 7, 14 9:20 am
so what about hamas tammuz? why the silence when confronted with the obvious problems to your ideal of a world where the nation and people of israel no longer exist? as the leading political body of the palestinians in gaza, don't their actions matter? if you magically disappear the israeli's based on their lack of a right to exist, hamas will be in charge of a significant military right? do you really think their attacks on civilian populations will stop at that point? no more child labor deaths at that point?
what's the point of criticizing others of supporting baby killers while you're supporting baby killers?
and wtf is a "zionist bot?" did you make that up because someone called your auto-post program a 'bot?'
is you're idea of intelligent debate to say 'bounce off me stick to you?' such as when you're confronted with the notion of intellectual dishonesty, you just say 'you're intellectually dishonest.'
Today is the 12th day of Israel's murderous attacks on Gaza.
The Palestinian body count is 336, 70 of whom are kids. This has become a murderous spree of killing for the zionist terrorist army, supported by government of this racist colonial entity and by their people , many of whom have been turning increasingly into blood thirsty mobs urging the murder of Palestinian
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From Israeli calls for Palestinian blood ring at fever pitch :
On the eve of Abu Khudair’s lynching, Member of Knesset (Israel’s parliament) and government faction whip Ayelet Shaked issued a call over Facebook to ethnically cleanse the land, declaring “the entire Palestinian people is the enemy.” She advocated their complete destruction, “including its elderly and its women,” adding that these must be slaughtered, otherwise they might give birth to more “little snakes.”
... Since the beginning of July, raging crowds of Jewish Israelis just like these have marched through Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Nazareth and Beer Sheva, chanting “Death to Arabs” and “Death to Leftists,” swarming and attacking vulnerable victims. While a tiny contingent of radical Israelis have formed a loose “anti-fascist” network that tries to patrol city streets and prevent additional lynchings, they are extremely few in numbers and cannot be everywhere at all times.
While Israeli leaders unleash conscripted soldiers to bombard Gaza, they dispatch ultra-nationalist vigilantes to conquer cities inside Israel. With the incitement to murder Palestinians (and the few Israeli allies they have) continue unabated, it seems to be only a matter of time before the bubbling bloodlust boils overs into a bloodbath.
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I am sure that you, the people behind Archinect, are well aware of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, this racist colonial entity that has been described by Moshé Machover as being far worse than the south african apartheid system: "talk of Israeli ‘apartheid’ serves to divert attention from much greater dangers. For, as far as most Palestinians are concerned, the Zionist policy is far worse than apartheid. Apartheid can be reversed. Ethnic cleansing is immeasurably harder to reverse; at least not in the short or medium term."
The global BDS movement is a peaceful movement that has been, in the face of Israeli racist, oppressive and genocidal policies against the Palestinians, garnering great traction around the world as people everywhere are increasingly grasping the nature of the Zionist establishment that is called Israel. Through a deliberate, effective boycotting Israeli products, academics, businesses, items of interest, the movement contributes to the economic and moral isolation of Israel.
As you might know, there is also the US Campaign for the Academic & Cultural Boycott of Israel , whose mission statement states the following:
“In light of Israel’s persistent violations of international law, and Given that, since 1948, hundreds of UN resolutions have condemned Israel’s colonial and discriminatory policies as illegal and called for immediate, adequate and effective remedies, and Given that all forms of international intervention and peace-making have until now failed to convince or force Israel to comply with humanitarian law, to respect fundamental human rights and to end its occupation and oppression of the people of Palestine, and In view of the fact that people of conscience in the international community have historically shouldered the moral responsibility to fight injustice, as exemplified in the struggle to abolish apartheid in South Africa through diverse forms of boycott, divestment and sanctions..."
I notice that there are Israeli businesses being hosted within Archinect's firm listings (for example). As are listings of Israeli universities within the academic section. I highly urge Archinect, the people behind it, Paul, the editors, the writers....to desist from ignoring your responsibilities apropos taking a stand against this racist entity and to remove all Israeli related material from Archinect. You, like everyone else has that responsibility, because you have the knowledge and you have the right of choice. To ignore this is to be complacent and to be regressive.
As a virtual space that spans the social, the professional and the academic, as a gathering of professionals including architects, designers, artists, engineers and others, as a gathering of minds that by implication suggests a progressive humanist endeavor, please instate an anti-zionist, anti-israeli policy (that covers israeli academics, businesses, media, etc) in the spirit of the BDS movement.
That's because you're hateful.
What is "false debate"?
Does "false debate" mean that one must engage with views that might conflict with one's own worldview?
look in the mirror and the answer will appear to you. you should teach it.
Am I "false debate"?
Your rejoinder amounts to: "I know you are but what am I?"
"Let's give Israeli authorities architecture and planning awards for building significant settlements on rather difficult hillsides and and lands gifted by God to immigrant Jews from Russia and Brooklyn."
Actually, many Jews in Israel are Mizrahi Jews expelled from Arab countries in 1948.
Not to mention Holocaust survivors whose home states wouldn't take them back after they were released from death camps. But whatever, details!
You are posting pages of information but not addressing any of the atrocities inflicted on civilian population of Gaza that took a place last summer. You are not offering any debate on that but arguing on how it is everybody else's fault. That is a false debate in the face of documented facts and barbaric bombing that took a place just recently.
And here is a response to your silly and personal attack on my teaching.. Btw, I teach architecture not debate.
From A new hasbara campaign: Countering the 'Arab Narrative'
'Justice for Jewish refugees from Arab countries', new propaganda initiative from Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon.
The expulsion of Palestinians and destruction of hundreds of villages in 1948 was a catastrophe (Nakba) for an entire society, while in the case of Jews from the Middle East, their arrival in Israel was in line with the state’s Zionist raison d’être.
In the words of Israeli professor Yehouda Shenhav, "any reasonable person" must acknowledge the analogy to be "unfounded" :
Palestinian refugees did not want to leave Palestine...Those who left did not do so of their own volition. In contrast, Jews from Arab lands came to this country under the initiative of the State of Israel and Jewish organizations. Some came of their own free will; others arrived against their will. Some lived comfortably and securely in Arab lands; others suffered from fear and oppression.
There are other problems. Australian professor (and supporter of Israel) Dr Philip Mendes has written how "the Jewish exodus from Iraq and other Arab countries took place over many decades, before and after the Palestinian exodus" and "there is no evidence that the Israeli leadership anticipated a so-called population exchange when they made their arguably harsh decision to prevent the return of Palestinian refugees". In other words: "the two exoduses…should be considered separately".
Furthermore, one person’s rights are not ‘cancelled out’ by another’s: the rights of Jews to recognition of and compensation for lost properties across the Arab world are legitimate, and entirely separate from the Palestinian refugees’ rights. Yet revealingly, ask Danny Ayalon and Israel advocacy groups if they support full rights for all refugees, Jewish and Palestinian, and you will get prevarication or silence.
In the hands of Israel’s Foreign Ministry, this is yet another cynical propaganda ploy that seeks to counter growing awareness of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine with rhetoric of "the other Nakba". As the co-founder of Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa (JIMENA) put it in 2007:
Most of the people advocating campus hasbara
Also...not forgetting the involvement of Zionist agents targeting Jewish communities around the Middle East in order to scare them into aliyahs:
1950–1951 Baghdad bombings refers to the bombing of Jewish targets in Baghdad, Iraq, between April 1950 and June 1951.
Two confirmed activists in the Zionist underground were found guilty by an Iraqi court for the bombing, and were sentenced to death. Another was sentenced to life imprisonment and seventeen more were given long prison sentences.[1]
However, the question of who was to blame for the attacks has drawn considerable disagreement. Whilst the allegations against Israeli agents had "wide consensus" amongst Iraqi Jews,[2][3][4][5][6] there was a tendency to blame their ills and misfortunes on the Zionist emissaries.[citation needed] However, the allegations against the Zionist agents were viewed as "more plausible than most" by the British Foreign Office.[7][8][9][6][3][4]
Such involvement has been consistently denied by the Israeli government, including by a Mossad-led internal inquiry,[10] even following the 2005 admission of the Lavon affair.[11][12][13][14][15]
Historians who assign responsibility for the bombings to an Israeli or Iraqi Zionist underground movement suggest the motive was to encourage Iraqi Jews to immigrate to Israel,[16][17][12][18] as part of the ongoing Operation Ezra and Nehemiah.
From Zionist Crimes Against The Jews
Posted by Editor on November 11, 2013 in Arab World, News/Politics | | 4 Responses
Zionist Crimes Against The Jews
By Dr. Elias Akleh Intifada Palestine
In mid last October, the Israeli main paper Yedioth Ahranoth (Ynetnews) published a historical study by Yigal Bin-Nun; an Israeli historian and professor in Bar Ilan University, confirming and documenting Zionists crimes against Moroccan Jews in North Africa in order to convince them to immigrate to Israel. In his study Bin-Nun has confirmed what I wrote back in 2007 (The Myth of Jewish Refugees from Arab Land).
Bin-Nun is originally a Moroccan Jew, who immigrated with his family to Israel. In his historical research he states that the Mossad; the Israeli secret service, had sent to Morocco in early 1960s a group of its agents, whose primary mission was to carry out terrorist attacks against the well-settled Jews, to convince them that they were the victims of persecution by the kingdom, and to encourage them to immigrate to, and to settle in Israel promising them all expenses paid throughout the whole process.
For many centuries Morocco (Al-Maghrib) had large prosperous Jewish communities, known as Mizrahi Jews, who lived peacefully with their Moslem Arab neighbors. This peaceful coexistence encouraged Spanish Jews (Sephardim) to escape to Morocco during the Spanish Reconquista period when Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand recaptured Spain in the 13th century, and ordered the Jews to either convert to Christianity or leave the country. After 781 years of flourishing existence under the Islamic Caliphate rule, many Spanish Jews escaped Christian persecution to the more welcoming Islamic Morocco.
The Jewish virtual library confesses that Mizrahi and Sephardim Jews of Morocco enjoyed greater equality with Muslims. Many of them gained important positions in the government administration as officials and in courts of law as judges. The Jews had their own quarters in the main cities, where they had their own schools, their own synagogues, and even their own courts and judges. They comprised a large section of the middle class, who played large roles in the economy, trade, industry and educational system of the kingdom.
All this was changed with the invention of the Israeli state, especially after Zionist leaders had sent their agents to encourage and to bribe Moroccan Jews, among many other Arab Jews, to immigrate to occupied Palestine. Considering themselves Moroccan citizens of the Jewish faith, the Jews initially rejected Zionism. Yet some young Jews were seduced into enlisting into the Mossad. They were smuggled into Israel to receive military and terrorist training. They were sent back to Morocco to perpetrate terrorist attacks against both Jews and Arabs and to distribute hate inciting leaflets in order to incite conflict between the two groups. Three agents were arrested and allegedly died under torture.
when you say:
Let's give israeli army nobel peace price for everything they did for Gazan women, children and civilians.
was that genuine? are you actually advocating giving a nobel prize to the israeli army? or is this an example of 'false debate,' where you use sarcasm to hide the unfortunate fact that it's difficult for you or tammuz to discuss the actions that caused the israeli military to think it has to respond with such violence, or the actions that caused israeli legislatures to propose discriminatory referendums? i don't know whether you teach 'false debate,' but it seems you practice it.
if you want peace, why not post about how peace can be achieved, rather than just why we should all hate israel? otherwise, you just think israel doesn't have a right to exist - but it does exist. so this is your attempt to change the real situation into your ideal where you can negate the existence of the people and the nation of israel? if that's the case, it sounds a lot like you want to commit the sort of genocide you're accusing israel of committing.
the barbaric acts you're referring to did occur. nobody is disputing that. those acts have been addressed; we all agree israel committed violent acts. i think what others have tried to point out is that there were also violent acts carried out by palestinians and that played a role in causing israel to lash out the way they did. you and tammuz will only accept part of what happened as real. why not try to address the events that influenced the current course of action? because it's just easier to pretend israel is a monster? is it part of your academic background to disregard evidence if it doesn't support the propaganda you're currently trying to sell and call for the censorship of israeli universities since they might disagree with you?
Nicely stated, curt.
From Zionist role in flight of Jews from Iraq
The role of Israel and Zionist undercover agents in helping precipitate the departure of Jews from Iraq has long been suspected.
Naiem Giladi, an Iraqi Jew who joined the Zionist underground as a young man in Iraq and later came to regret his role in fostering the departure of some 125,000 Jews from Iraq, wrote that, “Zionist propagandists still maintain that the bombs in Iraq were set off by anti-Jewish Iraqis who wanted Jews out of their country.” But “the terrible truth,” Giladi said, “is that the grenades that killed and maimed Iraqi Jews and damaged their property were thrown by Zionist Jews.”
Giladi, who was born Naeim Khalaschi, gave his account in an article published by Americans for Middle East Understanding in 1998 which summarizes his book, Ben Gurion’s Scandals: How the Haganah and the Mossad eliminated Jews.
After being sentenced to death in Iraq for his Zionist activities, Giladi fled to Israel. Because his native language was Arabic, Giladi was assigned to assist the Israeli military occupation authorities expel Palestinians from their homes in al-Majdal (“Ashkelon”) by pressuring them to sign documents stating they were leaving to Gaza willingly:
I was there and heard their grief. “Our hearts are in pain when we look at the orange trees that we planted with our own hands. Please let us go, let us give water to those trees. God will not be pleased with us if we leave His trees untended.” I asked the Military Governor to give them relief, but he said, “No, we want them to leave.”
I could no longer be part of this oppression and I left. Those Palestinians who didn’t sign up for transfers were taken by force—just put in trucks and dumped in Gaza.
the barbaric acts you're referring to did occur. nobody is disputing that. those acts have been addressed; we all agree israel committed violent acts.
So I am boycotting Israel and advocating it publicly. What part of that you don't understand Curt?
why not try to address the events that influenced the current course of action?
Again, here is your address.
When are you hasbara not attack my personal professional life and practice? Are you all non-entity cowards? I tried everything to be forgiving for you all and even complimented some of you when you had a whiff of humanity in you. So far my job, my mother (by you curtcrumb?), my relatives, my writing and other personal things attacked by you. This is racist trash disguising as reasonable ghosts. Creatures to be more precise. My words really threatening your being that much to bring this personality attacks each time you are proven to be useless?
To be clear: Tammuz is now arguing that the mid-century expulsion of Arabian Jews was a Zionist conspiracy.
Orhan: no one is attacking your family, just your refusal to engage in heated debate with even a shred of civility.
and some fart called me vulgar the other day. what about the gang bang "real" and "cheap" vulgarities and lies directed towards me and to (you know who)..?
What vulgarity has been hurled against you?
Oh I forgot. . Somebody even called me Orphan and thought it was a fun project!
what does your mother have to do with this orhan? honestly, i would rather keep the conversation out of the gutter and be able to talk about the events that led to the current problem the palestinians are facing in a way that could help educate other readers and possibly help build a solution. i haven't been calling you names. i've been doing my best to act like you have the sort of professional demeanor your position would imply.
it wasn't just the people of israel being monsters. in order to move forward in a way that encourages peace, i think people have to understand what happened that caused the current situation to get as far out of hand as it's gotten.
you will not be able to understand what both the palestinians and israelis are currently facing if you refuse to accept half the of the atrocities that have happened. it's those things that have happened that caused the conflict to escalate to where it is now.
i understand you're boycotting israel. you absolutely have every right to do that, as does tammuz, and i'm not saying you should stop your personal boycott. i would rather archinect not get involved, but then i'm not on their staff so i don't think i get a say anyway.
i understand israel took land from the palestinians. i understand the israeli military mowed over arafat's compound. i understand hamas refuses to discuss disarming. i understand there is a lot of warranted resentment and hatred on both sides. you don't seem to understand why that happened. you seem to only understand israel hurt the palestinians, and you can't figure out why.
so why boycott instead of learning about what actually happened, talking about it, and trying to teach people what really happened instead of a skewed perspective designed to make people hate israel? why not try to find actual solutions instead of just faketivist boycotts and complaining?
Oh I forgot. . Somebody even called me Orphan and thought it was a fun project!
you should just pretend it was everyone who disagreed with you. maybe that would give you sound justification for your own immaturity?
Sorry an anonymous internet poster called you Orphan.
The myth of Palestinian land loss is laughable.
The 1946 map does not show sovereignty or land ownership of Palestinian Arabs. It just shows settlements of Jewish Palestinians in the British Palestine Mandate.
Just another example of how Hamas and Palestine consider any measure appropriate to deliver the nefarious and unjust message. Confusion, deceit, terror, and violence is within every message they bring forth. Their intolerance and brutal methods of society are in their last grasps...but they will be relinquished.
baby killers' supporters are now talking about civility...
all the evidence is documented in this thread. you can change your tune, anonymous names, you can do whatever you want but you can't hide from the fact that you supported murderous acts.
all we support here is a non violent boycott to bring world's attention to these crimes. we are winning and you are not.
say whatever you want. go ahead you have no shame anyway...
it is perhaps just a photo up but message is clear, even the good cop is getting tired of bad cop.
I wish you peace this weekend, orhan and Tammuz.
if you really mean it, thank you.
my days are quite peaceful and busy. i wish you the same.
OH SO INSPIRATIONAL!!!1!
here we go... that is what i mean. it never fails i guess. pretty soon somebody is going to say i am a hater. fucking cockroach FRaC. you are so full of shit that is why you sank that low...
and the whole time I thought it was FARC....oh its FRaC, my bad...
Victory for BDS campaign as UEFA decides against Jerusalem tournament bid
Posted on September 19, 2014 by Palestinian BDS National Committee
Activists stage a sit-in protest at the headquarters of the French Football Federation to protest plans to allow Israel to host UEFA 2020 games
The Union of European Football Associations has rejected an Israeli bid to host games during the 2020 European Championships. The decision follows a campaign by Palestinian sports teams and campaign groups and activists across Europe.
The Israeli Football Association bid to host games in Jerusalem as part of the UEFA 2020 tournament that will take place across 13 cities, but UEFA announced on Friday that Jerusalem was not one of the successful bidders. Israel was one of just 6 countries that failed in its bid to host games.
(...)
In a public letter protesting against UEFA’s decision to allow Israel to host the Under 21 tournament in 2013, more than 50 footballers including Didier Drogba and Frederik Kanoute called the Israeli-hosted tournament “a reward for actions that are contrary to sporting values”. In 2010, UEFA president Michel Platini said: “Israel must choose between allowing Palestinian sport to continue and prosper or be forced to face the consequences for their behavior”. Campaigners are now planning to intensify the pressure on Platini to live up to his promises and suspend the Israeli Football Association.
Statement: Over 250 Anthropologists Join Call for a Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions
Oct 01 2014by Jadaliyya Reports
[The following press release and statement announcing the endorsement by over 250 anthropoligists of the movement to boycott Israeli academic institutions were issued on 1 October 2014 by the below-identifed group of anthropologists.]
For Immediate Release
October 1, 2014
Over 250 Anthropologists Join the Call for a Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions
More than 250 anthropologists have signed a statement endorsing the burgeoning movement to boycott Israeli academic institutions in protest of Israel’s systematic human rights violations against the Palestinian people. These violations, in which many Israeli educational institutions are complicit, include denying Palestinians their right to education and academic freedom.
The full statement and signatory list are at http://anthroboycott.wordpress.com
As scholars who specialize in how power, oppression, and structural violence affect social life, and as witnesses to the State of Israel’s multiple and egregious violations of international law that constitute an assault on Palestinian culture and society, they pledge to abide by their discipline’s stated commitment to “the promotion and protection of the right of people and people’s everywhere to the full realization of their humanity.”
These anthropologists have determined that the policies, actions, and programs of Israeli academic institutions are complicit in the occupation and oppression of Palestinians in Israel and in the Occupied Territories in multiple ways. In calling for this institutional boycott, they pledge not to collaborate on projects and events hosted or funded by Israeli academic institutions, not to teach at or attend conferences or other events at such institutions, and not to publish in academic journals based in Israel. They remain open to collaboration with individual scholars based in the Israeli academy.
The signatories of the statement call on their anthropologist colleagues to join them, along with thousands of members of a growing number of US academic associations (including the American Studies Association, the Association for Asian American Studies, and the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association), in answering the call from Palestinian civil society as well as from a number of Israeli anthropologists, to cease legitimizing Israeli academic institutions and thereby condoning their role in the continued suppression of the basic rights of the Palestinian people.
Red Cross Volunteers: We Witnessed Israeli Soldiers Execute Palestinian Civilians In Cold Blood
Author: Kerry-Anne September 29, 2014 4:43 am
IDF soldiers arresting a Palestinian child at gunpoint
Volunteers for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) operations in Gaza have testified to witnessing the summary execution of Palestinians by Israeli soldiers during Operation Protective Edge.
Esteemed journalist Max Blumenthal was given unfettered access to the worst hit areas of Gaza during the summer’s onslaught by Israel. He provided this testimony to the Russell Tribunal on Palestine in Brussels last week, as the world’s leading jurists and civil society members assessed Israel’s culpability for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The executions seemed to fall into two categories: humiliation, and functional.
Here is one example of the jocular nature with which Israeli soldiers murdered some Palestinians in Gaza:
Dan Cohen and I conducted an interview with two ICRC volunteers from Gaza, 25-year-old Ahmed Awad, and 24-year-old Ala’a Alkusofi, who worked with ambulance crews throughout the war, the video of which will be released in the near future. They recalled entering Khuza’a during the siege of the town to collect the body of Mohamed Abadla, a local man who had been tied to a tree by both arms and riddled with bullets. When they arrived at the execution site, a group of Israeli soldiers ordered one of the volunteers’ colleagues to exit the ambulance, walk five meters forward, then light a cigarette lighter. When he did so, they shot him in the heart and leg, killing him in front of his colleagues.
On the functional side, evidence gathered by Blumenthal points to “a clear pattern” of executions of Palestinians able to speak or understand Hebrew.
“Hesham Naser Shamaly, 25, described to me what happened when five members of his family decided to stay in their home to guard the thousands of dollars of clothing stocks they planned to sell through their family business. When soldiers approached the home with weapons drawn, Shamaly said his father emerged from the home with his hands up and attempted to address them in Hebrew. “He couldn’t even finish the sentence before they shot him,” Shamaly told me. (His father survived.)
In Khuza’a just east of Khan Younis, multiple witnesses described soldiers gathering locals in the center of town as they occupied the area on July 23, then asking if anyone spoke Hebrew. When a 54-year-old man stepped forward to answer in the affirmative, they shot him in the heart.
When I interviewed the Abu Said family in the southern city of Rafah, I found more evidence of the wanton targeting of Palestinian civilians who spoke Hebrew. Nineteen-year-old Mahmoud Abu Said told me when Israeli soldiers arrived at his family’s home on the city’s eastern outskirts, they immediately inquired if anyone spoke Hebrew. When his father, Abdul Hadi Abu Said, answered in the affirmative, they shot him in the chest (he miraculously survived).”
Beyond these deaths aimed to humiliate Gaza civilians, or eradicate Hebrew speakers, there were other clear war crimes — including the murder of a mentally disabled man.
At the eastern edge of the central area marked in orange Hebrew letters as “Soccer Field,” I met Mohammed Fathi Al Areer. His home was a virtual cave furnished with a single sofa. In Al Areer’s backyard, four of his brothers were executed. One of them, Hassan Al Areer, was mentally disabled and had little idea he was about to be killed. Mohammed Al Areer said he found bullet casings next to the heads of his family members when he discovered their decomposing bodies.
A further worrying aspect of Operation Edge was the wiping out of entire families in targeted attacks. During the Summer, 89 Palestinian families in Gaza were wiped out entirely, with not a single family member left. As of 24th August, the cessation of formal hostilities, at least 142 families had lost more than three family members in a single incident.
You can see this represented by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) report of 9th September 2014.
According to Blumenthal’s evidence, one such family was found in the rubble of Khuza’a:
The ICRC volunteers told us they later found a man in Khuza’a with rigor mortis, holding both hands over his head in surrender, his body filled with bullets. They then discovered a family — men, women and children — so badly decomposed they had to bury them with a bulldozer in a mass grave. The vast majority of bullet wounds they found were to the head and chest.
Images of the of bodies of civilians of en ethnic group murdered in cold blood being poured into mass graves evokes the very worst memories of 20th century genocide. As such, 327 survivors of the Nazi holocaust (and their descendents) recently wrote an open letter, published in the New York Times and Israel’s Haaretz newspaper, condemning the ‘massacre’ in Gaza. They wrote:
“Genocide begins with the silence of the world”
The response from within Israel?
Holocaust survivors who think like this are invited to die in the gas chambers.
Something very wrong is happening in Israeli society. It is time to speak out. Our silence is complicity.
You can see the full testimony of Max Blumenthal below, and for access to the full tribunal click here.
Just in case you ask, yet again, why the US is involved in this, yada yada:
The US and Israel are to blame for Arab misery: let me count the ways
By As'ad AbuKhalil - Mon, 2014-09-29 15:42- Angry Corner
It is the season of the revival of the “Arab Mind”: propagandists for Saudi princes around the world are peddling the same message contained in the racist book, The Arab Mind. Propagandists of Saudi princes who write in English have another task: they are competing to inherit the role of Fouad Ajami in Zionist US media. They know how much American mainstream media and Israel appreciate the schtick that Arabs are responsible for their misery, or that, as Ajami put it over and over again in his cliché, Arab wounds are self-inflicted. Saudi Arabia decided on orders of the US to take on ISIS and the Saudi regime may also have its own fears from ISIS. But the propaganda outlets of Saudi regime act and sound in unison, claiming that the Saudi regime is blameless, and that the US and Israel are humanitarian warriors in the Arab world, and that Arabs are backward by their very nature. To blame the US or Israel for Arab wars and divisions is tantamount to blasphemy in the Wahhabi doctrine.
Nevertheless, it is not an arduous task to enumerate the various ways in which the US and Israel are directly or indirectly responsible for Arab misery and the state of wars. Let me count the ways:
1.) Civil wars: there has not been one Arab civil war since the WWII which was not instigated or at least prolonged by the US and or Israel, from Lebanon, to Sudan, to Iraq, to Syria, to Somalia, to Jordan, and Algeria.
2.) Divisions, partitions, and secessions: the US and Israel have supported or armed every single Arab secessionist movement from the split of the United Arab Republic (UAR), to the Kurdish revolt in Iraq, to the partitionists in Lebanon, to the Southern Sudanese rebels, to the attempt to tear apart the Iraqi state after 2003.
3.) The US has prevented heavy, and even light, industrialization of the region. In all cases where the US sponsored the imposition of market economy, the markets were flooded with imported products, and the US – through the World Bank and the IMF – insisted on the dismantling of the public sector. Compare the state of military and civilian industrialization of Egypt under Nasser with its current affairs since the formation of the Camp David regime. Egypt was on par with the South Korean economy and, without the Camp David regime, Egypt would have surpassed India in economic development.
4.) The US (acting often on behalf of Israel but also on its own volition) worked to undermine the military power of all Arab states. The US clearly destroyed the Iraqi army, and it has been working hard to destroy the Syrian army, and it turned the Lebanese, Jordanian, and Egyptian armies into police forces capable only of internal repression. It also forced the Libyan regime of Qadhdhafi to surrender his most advanced WMD potential. To be sure, Gulf regimes were allowed to import advanced but restricted weapons whose main purpose is cash transfers from the Gulf to the West, and for possible future use by the US to protect these regimes and Israel.
5.) US and Israel have sponsored the overwhelming majority of Arab repressive regimes. The repressive regimes of Morocco, Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria (after Houari Boumediene), Sudan (under Gaafar Numayri), Somalia (under Siad Barre who drove the country to ruin), Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Jordan, Iraq (under Saddam Hussein in the 1980s), UAE, Oman, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Lebanon in its most repressive eras. The people of the region suffered a great deal in their attempts to overthrow their regimes but the US insisted on the preservation of those regimes.
6.) The US and Israel helped train and equip the torture and repression apparatuses in Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, UAE, Oman, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Jordan, Lebanon (under certain regimes of Sham`un, and Gemayyel), Iraq (in the 1980s), Kuwait, and Somali (under Siad Barre).
7.) The US sponsored and supported the most conservative and most reactionary brands of Islam during the Cold War and worked with the Saudi, UAE and Jordanian regimes to unleash a militant internationalist Jihadi Islam to pit against Nasser and against world communism.
8.) The US has always been on the side of the regimes against the side of those who champion feminism, enlightenment, progress, and secularism.
9.) The US and Israel fought all attempts of Arab unity and integration, and during the Cold War conflated Arab nationalism with communism, by the admission of Archie Roosevelt in his “For Lust of Knowing.”
10.) The US funded and/or armed the worst militias and reactionary political parties in the region.
11.) The US funded and sponsored the worst samples of the Arab press: the most sectarian and the most sleazy all in return for parroting American propaganda.
12.) The US deliberately prevented the Arabs from liberating Palestine and thus allowed Israel to remain a major factor in the destabilization and fragmentation of the region. The US violently prevented peace (real peace with the restoration of Palestinian rights over all of historic Palestine) from prevailing in the region.
13.) The US, while preventing the Arabs from obtaining the arms that are necessary to defend lands and people from Israeli aggression, flooded the region with arms that are only used for sedition, civil wars, and chaos.
14.) Through the peace process and through other means, the US sponsored the Israeli occupation and aggression which resulted in so much deaths and destruction since 1948.
15.) The US has pushed Arab regimes to enact more restrictions on the press in order to ban voices critical of the US and Israel.
16.) In the name of “the war on terrorism,” the US has in fact pushed Arab regimes toward more repression.
This is only a partial list and leaves one with no doubt that Arab problems are largely inflicted by the US and Israel (and the chorus in the EU).
Dr. As’ad AbuKhalil is a Professor of Political Science at the University of California, a lecturer and the author of The Angry Arab News Service. He tweets @asadabukhalil.
here we go... that is what i mean. it never fails i guess. pretty soon somebody is going to say i am a hater. fucking cockroach FRaC. you are so full of shit that is why you sank that low...
you, a hater?
baby killers' supporters are now talking about civility...
and
... even the good cop is getting tired of bad cop (Benjamin Netanyahu).
no, no, definitely not a h8ter!
An interesting and brief read from Max Blumenthal, concerning time and the 2 state solution (for those still holding on to that "solution", seriously or not so seriously):
Max Blumenthal
“Time is running out”: The fierce urgency of tomorrow
I must govern the clock, not be governed by it.”
–Golda Meir
Since the dawn of the peace process, serious men and women have warned that time was running out on a two state solution. If dramatic, urgent measures were not taken and painful compromises not made, the apocalypse would soon be upon us all. Though the peace processors rarely stated what the End of Days would look like, its form was always implied: The failure to establish a Palestinian state somewhere in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip would bring Israeli apartheid into the open, plunging the Jewish state into a crisis of legitimacy that would result in its rapid unraveling.
The transformation of an ethnically exclusivist Jewish state into a multi-ethnic confederation or democratic bi-national state is absolutely unacceptable to all parties involved in the peace process. That includes the Palestinian Authority, whose legitimacy rests on the notion that it will eventually become the steward of an autocratic Arab state with the consent of Israel and support from the US and EU. So as the facts on the ground render Palestinian statehood a fantasy, the peace processors must continually wind back the alarm clock on apartheid, indefinitely postponing the date with destiny to preserve the status quo and secure their paychecks.
Below, I have compiled news clippings dating back to 1981 that demonstrate the unusually fluid conception of time in the minds of the peace processors. Time may have run out long ago, but for them, it is never too late to negotiate. [continue to souce]
Diaries: Live from Palestine
The Month in Pictures: September 2014
The Electronic Intifada
3 October 2014
activestills14115261047egn9.jpg
A Palestinian family sits in their destroyed home in the al-Tuffah neighborhood of Gaza City on 21 September.
(Anne Paq / ActiveStills)
Families in the occupied Gaza Strip suffered further tragedy during the month of September after two migrant boats smuggling hundreds of passengers, the majority of them Palestinians from Gaza, were deliberately sunk off the coast of Malta. Only about a dozen survived.
“Reports indicate that most of those who drowned, or [are] still missing were young people, but there were also whole families,” the United Nations Office of the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) states.
The ongoing economic siege and repeated military assaults have compelled hundreds of young Palestinians in Gaza to pursue a better future by paying thousands of dollars to human traffickers to escape to Egypt via tunnels and then to Europe by sea, says OCHA.
Palestinian refugees from Syria — more than half a million of whom are directly affected by the conflict there — as well as Lebanon have been among the victims of previous migrant boat disasters in recent years.
Gaza Strip
The Gaza ceasefire reached on 26 August after 51 days of catastrophic violence was maintained during September despite Israel’s failure to lift the siege. Israeli naval forces fired on Palestinian fishing boats and farmers. Two mortars were fired from Gaza towards Israel, causing no casualties or damage, and Hamas forces reportedly arrested those responsible, according to OCHA.
Three Palestinians in Gaza were killed and two injured after unexploded ordnance (UXO) from the summer war detonated after the victims had loaded it into their vehicle and were driving in the area of Shujaiya east of Gaza City on 19 September, OCHA reports.
“As of late August, around 7,000 UXOs were estimated to be present in areas affected by the conflict, threatening the lives of both civilians and humanitarian workers,” OCHA adds. “Operations to clear UXOs however, have been affected as a result of limited capacity and restrictions on the entry of equipment to the Gaza Strip.”
Tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza remain displaced from the summer assault. As of 29 September, according to OCHA, there were more than 57,000 displaced persons sheltering in 18 schools administered by UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestine refugees. A further 40,000 to 50,000 Palestinians remain with host families.
The Rafah crossing with Egypt — the sole exit and entry point for the vast majority of the 1.8 million Palestinians in Gaza — remained partly open to a limited number of travelers, says OCHA.
Only two truckloads of exports exited Gaza through the Kerem Shalom commercial crossing as of 29 September, reports OCHA, the first trucks of exports since June.
West Bank
Meanwhile, in the occupied West Bank, Israeli forces killed two Palestinian men suspected of carrying out the abduction and slaying of three Israeli youths near Bethlehem in June. More than forty Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces in the West Bank so far this year; fourteen were killed in the equivalent period in 2013, according to OCHA.
Israeli forces shot 22-year-old Issa al-Qatari in the chest in al-Amari refugee camp near Ramallah on 9 September, killing him. Earlier in the month sixteen-year-old Muhammad Sinokrot died of injuries after he was shot in the head by Israeli border police in the Wadi al-Joz neighborhood of East Jerusalem.
Several incidents of violence were reported within or next to schools in the West Bank at the onset of the new academic year.
Three children were injured when Israeli forces fired rubber-coated steel bullets toward the Dar al-Aytam school in the Old City of Jerusalem on 24 September and on multiple occasions Israeli forces fired tear gas canisters at students as they left the al-Khadr secondary school in Bethlehem, OCHA reports.
A Tulkarem secondary school evacuated 350 students on 24 September after Israeli forces fired tear gas canisters nearby; several such incidents were reported at the Zeita boys school during September.
Settlers attack children
In the northern West Bank city of Nablus on 3 September, an armed Israeli settler chased Palestinian children and subsequently entered a high school where the youths had sought refuge, OCHA states.
“According to the school headmaster, the settler identified himself as a security guard of the settlement Eli and claimed that he was verbally insulted by one of the students. Shortly after, Israeli forces raided the school and evacuated around 450 teachers and students. This and another two schools in the area have been repeatedly raided by Israeli forces following various allegations by settlers,” according to OCHA.
Israeli settlers attempted to kidnap an eleven-year-old Palestinian child in East Jerusalem last month in the fifth such incident in the city since June, excluding the kidnapping and murder of sixteen-year-old Muhammad Abu Khudair on 2 July.
Israeli settlers sprayed chemicals into the faces of two children, aged ten and twelve, near the Ibrahimi mosque in Hebron on 13 September, OCHA reports. A seven-year-old boy was hospitalized after being run over by a settler in the same area the following day; five similar incidents were reported in Hebron addition to eleven throughout the West Bank since the beginning of the year, according to OCHA.
On 2 October, Israeli forces completely destroyed a dairy and farm in Hebron for lack of Israeli-issued building permits, OCHA states. The factory was raided earlier this summer and nearly $1 million worth of equipment was confiscated.
Owned by the Islamic Charitable Society, the dairy generates the majority of funds supporting several orphanages and schools; approximately 3,500 orphans are expected to be affected by the demolition, in addition to the factory’s twenty employees, according to OCHA.
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The high school certificate of seventeen-year-old Adeel Balata sits in the ruins of her Jabaliya refugee camp home on 14 September. The house was destroyed in an Israeli strike which killed eleven members of the Gaza family. Adeel, a successful student who aspired to become a doctor, was among those killed during the attack. Only one member of the family survived.
(Anne Paq / ActiveStills)
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Palestinians in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza Strip, hold pictures of their relatives who were killed during the Israeli offensive during the 10 September visit of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh.
(Ashraf Amra / APA images)
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A Palestinian woman inspects her house which was destroyed in an Israeli airstrike during this summer’s seven-week offensive in the east of Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip on 13 September.
(Abed Rahim Khatib / APA images)
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Palestinians in Gaza City hold pictures of their relatives who went missing after two migrant boats carrying five hundred smuggled passengers, many of them from Gaza, were deliberately sunk in the Mediterranean, 21 September.
(Mohammed Asad / APA images)
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Palestinian migrants sit in a police building in Rafah after their arrival to the Palestinian side in the southern Gaza Strip on 23 September. Egyptian naval forces arrested Palestinian migrants and sent them back to Gaza, witnesses said.
(Abed Rahim Khatib / APA images)
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Freed Palestinian prisoner Salim al-Hashash sits on the shoulders of a relative during the celebration of his release from Israeli prison in Rafah, southern Gaza Strip, 24 September. Al-Hashash served ten years after he was convicted of being a member of Hamas’ armed wing and for taking part in resistance against the Israeli army, according to his family.
(Abed Rahim Khatib / APA images)
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Palestinians take part in a protest in front of the Red Cross’ office in Gaza City demanding the release of their relatives held in Israeli jails, 22 September.
(Mohammed Asad / APA images)
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Palestinians carry the body of sixteen-year-old Muhammad Sinokrot during his funeral in the Wadi al-Joz neighborhood of East Jerusalem on 8 September. The boy was wounded by police fire on 31 August and died from his injuries on 7 September.
(Faiz Abu Rmeleh / ActiveStills)
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Palestinians throw stones at Israeli police during a protest following the death of a Palestinian teenager in the Wadi al-Joz neighborhood of East Jerusalem on 7 September. Sixteen-year-old Muhammad Sinokrot was wounded by police fire in the neighborhood on 31 August and died from his injuries on 7 September.
(Faiz Abu Rmeleh / ActiveStills)
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Palestinian women mourn as men carry the body of Issa al-Qatari during his funeral in the al-Amari refugee camp near the West Bank city of Ramallah, 10 September. Al-Qatari was killed by Israeli forces earlier in the day after camp residents confronted raiding soldiers.
(Faiz Abu Rmeleh / ActiveStills)
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Palestinian security forces carry the body of Raed al-Jabari, 35, during his funeral in the West Bank city of Hebron on 12 September. Al-Jabari died in Israel’s Soroka Medical Center after he was tortured by Israeli prison guards while being transferred between jails, Palestinian officials say.
(Mamoun Wazwaz / APA images)
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Osama Bseiso, 41, lies on the ground after he was injured during clashes with Israeli forces at a protest against the Jewish settlement of Ofra in the West Bank village of Silwad, near Ramallah, on 12 September.
(Shadi Hatem / APA images)
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The Israeli settlement of Beitar Illit, built on land expropriated from the Palestinian village of Wadi Fukin, continues to encroach on even more land taken from the surrounding Bethlehem area, 26 September.
(Ahmad Al-Bazz / ActiveStills)
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Palestinian youths confront Israeli forces during a military operation at Ein Beit Alma refugee camp near the West Bank city of Nablus on 3 September.
(Nedal Eshtayah / APA images)
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Palestinian activists protest in front of the Ramallah offices of the architect firm Assia on 21 September. Activists state that Assia is collaborating with Israel’s plans to forcibly transfer 12,500 Palestinians from East Jerusalem to a town in the Jordan Valley by agreeing to build the new town project.
(ActiveStills)
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Palestinian students protest the US State Department’s development agency during the visit of the American consul to an-Najah National University in the West Bank city of Nablus on 29 September.
(Nedal Eshtayah / APA images)
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Residents of the unrecognized village of Dahamash and supporters protest against the plan to demolish sixteen houses in their village in the Ramle-Lod area of present-day Israel, 13 September. Residents have long struggled to get the state to recognize the village and provide it with basic services.
(Keren Manor / ActiveStills)
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Israeli forces demolish a dairy near the West Bank city of Hebron on 2 September.
(Mamoun Wazwaz / APA images)
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Palestinian children walk on the rubble of their home which was demolished by Israeli forces in the Beit Hanina neighborhood of East Jerusalem, 3 September.
(Faiz Abu Rmeleh / ActiveStills)
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Palestinian students arrive to Arab al-Kaabneh school near the West Bank city of Jericho on 8 September. Israeli authorities have threatened to demolish the school’s structures because they were built without an Israeli permit.
(Shadi Hatem / APA images)
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Boys line up in the morning for daily exercises in a United Nations-run school in the Shujaiya neighborhood east of Gaza City on 15 September. The school year in Gaza was been delayed because of Israel’s offensive, during which UN schools became shelters for many of the tens of thousands displaced.
(Anne Paq / ActiveStills)
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Palestinian students attend the second day of school in a quarter of the Shujaiya neighborhood east of Gaza City on 15 September.
(Anne Paq / ActiveStills)
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Displaced children play a UN school in Beit Hanoun, northern Gaza Strip, 7 September.
(Ashraf Amra / APA images)
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Palestinian children who medics said were wounded during the Israeli offensive on Gaza this summer wait to be given permission to cross into Egypt at the Rafah crossing for treatment on 8 September.
(Abed Rahim Khatib / APA images)
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Palestinian children hold flags and banners during a rally calling for an end to the Israeli blockade in Gaza’s seaport on 8 September.
(Ashraf Amra / APA images)
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Palestinian boys take part in a military-style exercise at a training course organized by Hamas in Gaza City on 28 September.
(Mohammed Talatene / APA images)
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A Palestinian father receives a diploma for his son who was killed in the Israeli war on Gaza during a commencement ceremony at the University College of Applied Sciences in Gaza City on 8 September.
(Mohammed Asad / APA images)
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A Palestinian stands next to a map spray-painted by Israeli soldiers earlier this summer in a home in the Shujaiya neighborhood east of Gaza City on 4 September.
(Anne Paq / ActiveStills)
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Mortars and spent ammunition from Israel’s summer war on Gaza are collected in the home of Suleiman Abu Jamaa in the southern Gaza Strip town of Khan Younis on 11 September.
(Abed Rahim Khatib / APA images)
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Employees of the dismissed government in the Gaza Strip wait to receive their salaries at a Gaza City bank on 11 September. The failure of the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority to pay the salaries of 40,000 public servants in Gaza posed an obstacle for the fragile national unity government.
(Mohammed Asad / APA images)
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Palestinians inspect their farmland east of Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, near the boundary with Israel, on 2 September. The land was damaged during Israel’s massive summer assault on Gaza.
(Abed Rahim Khatib / APA images)
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A Palestinian tailor sews at a workshop in Rafah, southern Gaza Strip, on 4 September.
Israel Does Not Have A Right To Exist
Affirming Israel’s right to exist has almost become the diplomatic standard in the Middle East. Why, anyone who would dare challenge this notion is obviously not rational, to say the least.
Yet the fact is, Israel does not have a right to exist. That is, Israel does not have a moral right to exist.
Israel was declared a country in Palestine when that declaration was against the will of the majority of the people living in Palestine at the time. Thus, the right of the people of Palestine to self-determination was denied. It was morally wrong. It is that simple.
Of course, the government of Israel does exist for many reasons. The two most prominent are that many feel sympathy for Jews because of the history of persecution, and therefore support the Jew’s desire for a “homeland” where they would be immune from persecution.
However, the fact that the Jews were persecuted in various times and places in history doesn’t give them the right to persecute someone else. It doesn’t give Jews the right to deny the right to self-determination to the Palestinians. Two moral wrongs don’t make a moral right.
It is also interesting that the claim for a Jewish homeland would presumably mean that Jews would want land that would not be taken away from them by someone else claiming a divine right to their homeland. That is very interesting indeed.
Another reason why Israel exists is the result of support from America, and much of that support is from Christians who believe the Bible affirms the Jew’s claim of “divine right” to the land of Palestine. Of course, there are many Christians who disagree with that conclusion, and believe it is a severe misunderstanding of the Bible.
However, what is interesting is that the Christian debate is irrelevant--Jews believe that they have a divine right to the land. And this claim is the legitimate prerogative of the Jewish faith. In fact, this is a popular claim by many faiths. Many groups of people around the world believe that they have a divine right to various lands. In fact, many in the Arab world believe that Palestine is “Arab Land”.
This raises questions of what is morally right when there is a divine right claim to the land. Is a claim of divine right a legitimate or moral reason to settle competing land claims? And, is it morally right to force one claim of divine right on someone who doesn’t recognize that claim?
The obvious answer is no, it is not morally right to force a claim of divine right on someone that doesn’t recognize that claim. It is not morally right because no one wants to be deprived of their land or property because someone else makes a divine right to their land or property that they don’t recognize. Christians would recognize this principle as the Golden Rule.
Thus, the larger issue in Palestine is not who has a divine right to the land. The issue that should be discussed is who has the moral right, and that issue has been largely absent in the debate over Israel.
Jews and supporters of Israel have been successful in framing the debate in terms of denying the Jews their divine right. But the real issue is morality. Who has the legitimate moral right to the land? And how should that moral right be determined?
And most important, what if the Palestinians don’t recognize the Jew’s claim of divine right? Should the Palestinians be murdered and their property taken anyway? Is this the proper moral position of Christians, that if the Palestinians don’t recognize a divine right, they should be murdered?
Most Christians would find that murdering Palestinians in order to impose a divine right is abhorrent to Christianity. It would be morally wrong, and thus Israel does not have a moral right to exist.
If murder or war is not morally correct in arbitrating land disputes, what is the correct moral path? The popular moral tenet in America is that the will of the people should be recognized in settling political disputes. The preamble to the Constitution begins with “We the people, …” Land claims in Palestine should have been settled by the will of all the people of Palestine.
And how should the will of the people be determined? In America, the will of the people is morally determined by voting. Americans viscerally understand that determining the will of the people through majority vote is a legitimate and moral method of settling virtually any dispute.
When the Jews declared Israel a state in 1948, Jews were approximately one-third of the population. Had there been a vote in all of Palestine in 1948 to ascertain if the will of the Palestinian people agreed that Israel had a right to be a state, that right would have been denied. The majority of the people of Palestine did not grant the Jews a right to declare Israel a sovereign state.
Of course, no vote was ever taken. Thus, for the Jews to ignore the will of the Palestinian people and declare Israel a state was morally wrong. The moral right to allow the will of Palestinian people to prevail was denied.
Israel does not have a moral right to exist.
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I only disagree with the above article on the generalization of the Jewish stance. Of course, there are many Jews -from, both, a religious and a moral standpoint- who don't and did not believe in Israel's right to exist. Zionism was initiated by largely european non-religious Jews with socialist-nationalist ideals of building a nation state (on others` land and property, of course, in vein with european colonisation - ironically, as atheists, basing their right to land on biblical interperations ) and by ultra-religious Christians who wanted to send God's chosen people to Jerusalem.
More on Chrisitan Zionism...
From:
Christian Zionism: The New Heresy that Undermines Middle East Peace
Burgeoning Christian Zionist organizations such as the International Christian Embassy (ICEJ), Christian Friends of Israel (CFI) and Christians United for Israel (CUFI) wield considerable influence on Capitol Hill, claiming a support base in excess of 50 million true believers. This means there are now at least ten times as many Christian Zionists as Jewish Zionists. And their European cousins are no less active in the Zionist Hasbarafia, lobbying for Israel, attacking its critics and thwarting the peace process. The United States and Israel are often portrayed as Siamese twins, joined at the heart, sharing common historic, religious and political values.
(...)
Christian Zionists have shown varying degrees of enthusiasm for implementing six basic political convictions that arise from their ultra-literal and fundamentalist theology:
(...)
It is my contention after more than 10 years of postgraduate research that Christian Zionism is the largest, most controversial and most destructive lobby within Christianity. It bears primary responsibility for perpetuating tensions in the Middle East, justifying Israel's apartheid colonialist agenda and for undermining the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians.
The closing chapter of the New Testament takes us back to the imagery of the Garden of Eden and the removal of the curse arising from the Fall: "Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb… On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations." (Revelation 22:1-2) Surely this is what Jesus had in mind when he instructed his followers to act as Ambassadors of peace and reconciliation, to work and pray that God's kingdom would come on earth as it is in heaven.
The Revd Dr Stephen Sizer is the Vicar of Christ Church in Virginia Water and the author of Christian Zionism: Road-map to Armageddon? (InterVarsity Press, 2004); Zion's Christian Soldiers? (2007) and In the Footsteps of Jesus and the Apostles (Eagle, 2004). For more information see www.stephensizer.com
http://tabletmag.com/scroll/180400/hamas-killed-160-palestinian-children-to-build-terror-tunnels
Hamas Killed 160 Palestinian Children to Build Tunnels
Militant group used child labor to construct underground network in Gaza
An Israeli soldier is seen at the entrance of a tunnel dug by Palestinians beneath the border between the Gaza Strip and Israel on October 13, 2013. ( DAVID BUIMOVITCH/AFP/Getty Images)
As the death toll of Operation Protective Edge rises, the deaths of children are firmly in the spotlight—and rightly so. It pains all reasonable people to hear of children dying as the consequence of war. Hamas and its supporters display gruesome pictures of dead and wounded children in order to gain sympathy for their portrait of Israel as the villain intent on killing Palestinians. In response, Israel cites the need to stop Hamas from firing thousands of rockets at its own children, who are being forced to live in bomb shelters, as well as the need to eliminate the tunnels that Hamas dug into Israel in order to carry out terror attacks against Israelis. One tunnel opening was found underneath an Israeli kindergarten.
But who built those tunnels? The answer is Hamas, of course—using some of the same children who are now trapped under fire in Gaza.
The Institute for Palestine Studies published a detailed report on Gaza’s Tunnel Phenomenon in the summer of 2012. It reported that tunnel construction in Gaza has resulted in a large number of child deaths.
“At least 160 children have been killed in the tunnels, according to Hamas officials”
The author, Nicolas Pelham, explains that Hamas uses child laborers to build their terror tunnels because, “much as in Victorian coal mines, they are prized for their nimble bodies”.
Human rights groups operating in Gaza raised concerns about child labor in the tunnels as far back as 2008. Hamas responded by saying it was “considering curbs.” Following Operation Cast Lead in 2009 Hamas softened its position and the Interior Ministry established the Tunnel Affairs Commission (TAC) which, “In response to public concern at a rising toll of tunnel casualties, particularly of child workers…issued guidelines intended to ensure safe working conditions.” No mention is made in the report of the conditions that would result for both Palestinian and Israeli children from building tunnels that would be used to launch terror attacks.
Nor does it seem that Hamas paid much subsequent attention to ensuring the safety of the child workers that it used to build the tunnels that would wind up endangering the lives of many in Gaza. On a tour of the tunnels in 2011, Pelham noted that, “nothing was done to impede the use of children in the tunnels.”
Not only are Hamas misappropriating much of the humanitarian aid supplied to Gaza—800,000 tons of cement were used to construct the terror tunnels into Israel—they are also directly exploiting and endangering Gaza’s youth in their construction and operation.
Not forgetting that Israel just killed 495 to 578 Palestinian children in its latest spree and thousands of others before. Not forgetting that it oppresses and denies the rights of millions of Palestinians and that it stole their lands and properties.
And if these tunnels were built, its also precisely because of Israel and the throttling choke they have over Gaza. People are being driven to use everything they have in order to resist their mass oppression and ethnic cleansing. In a state of desperation, when one is in a virtual open air prison, near starved, subject to random killings and assassinations, can one apply the rules governing a state under easy normal conditions?
Furthermore, why the obsession these Zionist bots have in bringing up Hamas? In actual fact, Zionists have demonized each and every organization, Palestinian, Lebanese or other, that stands up to it, be it Arab leftists in their 60s and 70s heydays, PLO, now Hamas and Hezbollah. Whether religious or secular, whether comprising Muslims or Christians.
And furthermore, the mass persecution and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians cannot be explained in terms of response to Hamas. In fact, it is Hamas and its like that are a form of response to Israel's genocidal hold over the Palestinians and its desire to rid the land of Palestinians.
Each and every attempt to bring up Hamas here is a calculated Hasbara move in the hope to obfuscate and to render this a fight between two equal entities and two morally equivalent ones at that. This is, of course, a lie. There is absolutely, absolutely, no way one can justify Israel's calculated agenda of ethnically cleansing Palestine -by bullying out or murdering Palestinians, en masse- as a response to the resistance factions.
If you stand up for Palestine in America, ‘you’re the devil,’ Junot Diaz says
In September 30, novelist Junot Diaz gave a Presidential lecture at Clark University in Worcester, MA, and late in the appearance, a woman asked Diaz about his having signed a letter protesting Israeli funding for the Brooklyn Book Festival last month. Diaz said that scholars who speak out for Palestine can be driven out of MIT and have their tenure revoked — “that’s literally the reality.” Note that he is the Rudge and Nancy Allen Professor of Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
(See more)
MONDOWEISS article
"I mean I can’t even turn on the news for five seconds without hearing the most fucked-up racist shit about Arabs or Muslims that would never pass muster if we were talking about any other group. And so in that kind of atmosphere it’s just a shouting match. You know if you’re like, I think the occupation of fucking Palestine is fucked up on 40 different levels, people are like, you’re the devil, we’re going to fucking drive you out of MIT, we’re going to get your tenure taken away, we’re going to destroy you.
I mean that’s like literally the reality. Where you can say almost anything else. You could be like, ‘I hate humans.’ … Bien. Bien. [unintelligble/Spanish/laughter]
I mean, I’m sorry guys, just forget it, I mean just as a basic human being, on the basic, basic level: If you are occupying other people’s shit, guess what, you are fucked up. [Wild applause] That’s that. I mean, that’s that. and that’s a tough thing for people to stomach, man. Because we live in a country that’s currently occupying people’s fucking land. [Applause] Like, god forbid, Americans are so deranged about Palestine because Americans are thinking, like yo, if we give up here, these fucking Indians are going to want their shit back. Well maybe they should get their shit back. Since 90 percent of us don’t own anything, I dont’ know how much it would hurt us. But whatever." - Junot Diaz
It's weird how you're able to rationalize every single wrong that Hamas commits. Not to mention that the Institute for Palestine Studies wrote the report on the tunnels, and suddenly it's "hasbara." I smell intellectual dishonesty!
Zionist bots smelling themselves. It is their intellectual dishonesty in focusing and framing the aftereffect of their ideology of racism, colonizaion and hatred as if the backdrop of their racist occupation was not the very raison d'être. Their warped logic calculated to turn the victim into the perpetrator and thus to smuggle away, in the eyes of the weak of mind and sight, the singular responsibility that Zionism has in stealing away a whole country and the attempt at disappearing a whole people, the Palestinians. they will keep on saying "what about Hamas, what about Hamas..." like catatonic programmed post lobotomy zombies and feed others prepackaged arguments based neither on concern for the suffering of people and children or sound logic but on throwing up fust in the face of criticism against Israel.
Your points (or non-points) so far in this thread:
1 - Hamas is justified killing Palestinians whom it suspects to have spied on Israel because WAR!
2 - Hamas would NEVER put Palestinians in harm's way. (Zero response when confronted with footage showing Hamas placing rockets in residential areas).
3 - Hamas is justified in sending child workers to dig tunnels into Israel and misappropriating 800,000 tons of cement provided through foreign aid, because RACISM and COLONIALISM!
Listen dude, I've repeatedly stated that Israel isn't faultless. But it's astonishing that Hamas can do no wrong in your eyes.
Yawn, what a waste of pixels TAM's posts are.
It also makes sense that I'd be trying to address the problem of Hamas because they're the ones launching rockets at Israel.
We, minus Orhan and TAM, are all aware of this Alternative. They just picked the wrong horse to bet all their money on and cannot accept their mistakes.
so what about hamas tammuz? why the silence when confronted with the obvious problems to your ideal of a world where the nation and people of israel no longer exist? as the leading political body of the palestinians in gaza, don't their actions matter? if you magically disappear the israeli's based on their lack of a right to exist, hamas will be in charge of a significant military right? do you really think their attacks on civilian populations will stop at that point? no more child labor deaths at that point?
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/384004/child-labor-deaths-hamas-tunnels-are-no-surprise-spencer-case
what's the point of criticizing others of supporting baby killers while you're supporting baby killers?
and wtf is a "zionist bot?" did you make that up because someone called your auto-post program a 'bot?'
is you're idea of intelligent debate to say 'bounce off me stick to you?' such as when you're confronted with the notion of intellectual dishonesty, you just say 'you're intellectually dishonest.'